How to sell restored furniture

The chest of drawers took nine weekends and someone has just offered you £90 for it.

Restoring furniture for money works when you pick pieces where the restoration is light and the name does the pricing, publish every dimension including the ones nobody thinks to ask about, sell local-only with a stated radius and a banded delivery fee, and describe the condition honestly enough that nothing is a surprise at the door. A G Plan sideboard bought for £70 and sold at £420 is a good weekend. A Victorian wardrobe bought for £30 that needs veneer work is twenty-five hours you'll never bill for.

Choosing the piece is most of the business. The rest of this is what happens after you've chosen.

Choose the piece for the hours, not the challenge

The instinct is to buy the thing that needs you most. Resist it. The money in restoration is in pieces where a competent afternoon adds a hundred pounds, not in pieces where a heroic month adds sixty.

The useful test before you hand over any money: how many hours does this need, and does the name on the back carry a price without me?

Mid-century British teak is the obvious answer for a reason. G Plan, McIntosh, Nathan, Younger, Meredew, Stag, Ercol. Buyers already know those names, already know roughly what they cost, and mostly want the piece cleaned rather than transformed. A teak sideboard that wants a wash, a light denib, two coats of oil and a set of new castors is five to seven hours. That's a business.

Compare it to a 1920s oak wardrobe with lifted veneer, a split back panel and a missing key. Twenty-five hours, at least, and the finished piece sells for less than the sideboard because fewer people want a wardrobe and none of them can get it up the stairs.

Some rules of thumb worth stealing:

• Buy what one person can move. Sideboards, chests, nests of tables, chairs, desks. Not wardrobes, not three-piece suites, not pianos.
• Buy solid or well-veneered, never chipboard with a wood-effect skin. Nothing you do to chipboard makes it worth more.
• Check the joints before the finish. A loose joint on a chair is twenty minutes with glue and a clamp. A cracked leg is a new leg.
• Smell the drawers. Musty is a wash and a week in the air. Damp is rot you can't see yet.
• Avoid anything upholstered unless you upholster. A reupholstery quote will be more than the piece is worth.

Sourcing is house clearances, local auction, car boots, and the online marketplaces where people are moving house on a Sunday. The best deals are always in the "must go today" listings, which is why you want a car with the seats already down.

Every dimension, including the one nobody publishes

Furniture listings get one question above all others, and it isn't about price. It's "will it fit".

Answer it before it's asked, and answer it in millimetres or centimetres, consistently:

What to publish	Why it matters
Width, depth, height	The obvious three, and still missing from half of all listings
Narrowest point for a doorway	The number that decides whether the sale completes
Internal drawer dimensions	People are buying storage, not furniture
Seat height and seat depth on chairs	The difference between a dining chair and an armchair
Approximate weight	Tells the buyer whether they need help
Whether the legs come off	Turns an impossible stairwell into a possible one
Height of the tallest fixed part	For anything going under a shelf or a sloped ceiling

And the sentence that saves you a wasted evening: measure the piece with the handles on. A 92cm sideboard with brass pulls is 99cm through a doorway. You will find this out at seven in the evening on collection day with the customer's husband holding the other end, and there is nothing to be done about it at that point except drive it home again.

Put the doorway number in the listing explicitly, in its own line: "Narrowest dimension for getting it through a door: 46cm, with the handles fitted." Nobody else does this. It reads as competence and it prevents the single most expensive kind of failed sale, which is the one where you've already loaded the van.

Local only, and how to say so without losing sales

A sideboard is not a parcel. Pallet couriers will move furniture and they'll quote you for it, but the cost is substantial, the packing is real work, and the damage risk on a restored surface is not theoretical. Get a quote for one piece before you promise anything to anyone, and treat national delivery as a separate product with a separate price rather than something you absorb.

For most people restoring furniture at home, the right answer is local only, said clearly and up front:

Collection from the postcode, or delivery within 25 miles from £30. Anything further is quoted individually.

That single line filters your enquiries brilliantly. The people who message you are people who can actually take the item, and you stop having three-day conversations that end with "oh, I'm in Cornwall".

Say the collection postcode district in the listing. Not the full address, not "the north of England". A district, so people can judge the drive in five seconds.

Delivery bands, two people, and the stairs conversation

Price delivery in bands and publish them. A number that changes depending on how the conversation is going reads as made up, because it is.

Something like:

Distance	Price	What's included
Collection	Free	You bring a car and a friend
Up to 5 miles	£20	Kerbside or ground floor
5 to 15 miles	£35	Kerbside or ground floor
15 to 30 miles	£60	Kerbside or ground floor
Beyond 30 miles	Quoted	Depends entirely on the piece

Work the numbers from your actual costs rather than from what feels reasonable. Van hire is somewhere in the region of £45 to £80 for a day locally, plus fuel, plus the insurance excess you're carrying. If you're doing three drops on the same day that's fine. If you're hiring a van for one £35 delivery, you've paid for the privilege of moving a sideboard. Batch deliveries onto one day a week and say so in the listing: "Deliveries run on Saturdays." Buyers accept it easily, and it turns a chaotic week into one loading morning. The method for costing this rather than guessing at it is in how to work out delivery charges, and the wider question of running your own local drops without a courier is in delivering locally without a courier.

Three things to state before delivery day, every time:

Ground floor and kerbside unless agreed. Stairs, lifts and awkward turns are a conversation, not an assumption. First-floor flat with a turn on the landing? Either you're charging more or the buyer has a friend waiting.

Two people, and one of them is theirs. Or you bring a second person and you charge for them. Do not turn up alone to a two-person piece and improvise. Backs are expensive.

Clear the route. Ask the buyer to move the hall table before you arrive. It sounds fussy. It saves fifteen minutes and a scraped edge on the piece you spent nine weekends on.

Condition notes that survive the doorstep

Restored furniture sells to people who care about wood. They will look closely, and they will spot the thing you didn't mention.

Use consistent language and use it every time, so buyers learn what you mean:

• Fully restored. Stripped back and refinished. The original surface is gone and that was a decision.
• Sympathetically restored. Cleaned, repaired and refinished with the original character kept. Marks that tell the piece's age are still there on purpose.
• Original, cleaned only. Nothing has been refinished. What you see is sixty years of use.
• Repaired. Say what, where, and with what.

Then list the flaws, individually, with a photograph for each. A ring mark on the top left. A chip on the front edge of the second drawer. A replaced handle that doesn't quite match the other five. Sun fade across the top where it stood by a window.

Two things you will be judged on by anyone who knows furniture, so get them right. Don't sand through veneer, which happens fast on 1960s pieces where the veneer is thinner than people expect. And think very hard before painting solid teak or oak, because a large part of the buying audience for these pieces considers it vandalism and prices accordingly. There's a market for painted furniture. It is not the same market, it pays less for the same hours, and you should know which one you're selling into before you open the tin.

Say what's been replaced. "New castors, originals missing when I bought it" is a sentence that costs you nothing and buys you the benefit of the doubt on everything else in the listing.

Photographing something that won't fit on a table

Clear one wall. That's the whole setup. A plain wall, daylight from the side, the piece pulled away from anything cluttered, and the ceiling lights off so you're not mixing warm bulbs with cool daylight.

Then drop the camera. Photograph at about a metre off the ground rather than at standing eye level. A sideboard shot from an adult's eye line looks squat and shows the top as a big empty plane. Shot from sitting height, it looks like the piece the buyer is imagining in their own room.

Eight frames does it:

1. Straight on, whole piece, square to the wall.
2. Three-quarter angle so the depth reads.
3. Top surface, close, in raking light, so grain and any marks are visible.
4. A drawer open, showing the runners and the interior.
5. The back. Restorers photograph the back and it builds enormous trust.
6. The maker's stamp or label, if there is one.
7. Every flaw, close, with something for scale.
8. The piece in a room, with a lamp or a plant, so the size reads.

The general one-window method applies here exactly as it does to anything else you sell, and it's set out in product photography for small sellers. The only change for furniture is that frame five, the back, is not optional.

Holding a piece, and what a deposit is for

Furniture is one-of-one and it takes up floor space. Holding a sideboard for someone who's "getting paid Friday" costs you the sale to the person who messages on Wednesday, and it costs you a corner of the garage.

So: a piece is held for whoever pays a deposit, and not for whoever asked first. £30 or £50, non-refundable, holds it for seven days. Say clearly what it does and what it doesn't do: it takes the item off sale, it comes off the final price, and it doesn't come back if they change their mind.

Almost nobody objects. People who are serious about a £420 sideboard find £50 easy, and the ones who object have told you something useful. The wording that makes this feel normal rather than aggressive is worked through in taking a deposit before you start.

Here's the honest limitation on the money side. Sailo takes nothing on bank transfer, which is how most furniture sales get paid here, and it never touches that money. What it can't do is tell you the transfer arrived. Only your bank statement can, so confirming the deposit is a thing you do yourself before you take the listing down.

If you want to take cards, that's the Business plan at $49 a month plus a Stripe account cleared for charges, and Sailo's cut is 1–3% of the goods after any discount, excluding delivery. On a £420 sideboard that's about £2.10, plus Stripe's own fee. The 1–3% is not your problem. The monthly subscription is, if you're selling two pieces a month. At four or five pieces a month it stops mattering, and that's roughly where it starts being worth it.

Worked example: Ruth, Leeds

Ruth restores mid-century teak in a single garage and sells about six pieces a month.

A representative piece: a McIntosh sideboard bought at a house clearance for £75. Six hours of work across two evenings, mostly cleaning, a light denib and two coats of oil, plus new castors at £14 and about £9 of oil and abrasives. She listed it at £420 with the full dimensions and the doorway number, and it sold in eleven days to a buyer eight miles away who paid £20 delivery.

That's £440 in, £98 of costs, six hours of work and an hour of driving. Roughly £49 an hour, which is why she does it.

The month around it is less flattering. Two pieces sat unsold for six weeks and one of them she eventually took £180 for, having paid £60 and put in nine hours. Across six pieces her average was closer to £190 clear each, and her garage was full for most of March.

Two things she changed. She stopped buying wardrobes entirely, which removed the pieces that took the longest and sold the slowest. And she started listing on a Thursday evening rather than a Sunday, because her buyers browse in the evening and message during the week, and a Sunday listing was quietly getting buried by Monday.

She also runs a stall at a monthly vintage fair with the smaller pieces, nests of tables and chairs, and treats it as advertising for the big items rather than as sales. Two of her six monthly sales now come from people who met her at the fair and bought from the link afterwards. Running a stall and an online shop as one operation rather than two is covered in selling offline and online at once.

What to do next

Go and measure the piece you're working on right now, with the handles fitted, and write down the narrowest dimension. Put that number in the listing on its own line.

Then write your delivery bands, pick your radius, and put both in every listing in the same words. Add your collection postcode district.

Then photograph the back. It's the frame that tells a buyer you know what you're doing, and it's the one almost nobody takes.