This article is about how to do quick and easy furniture makeovers as a beginner.

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Want to start flipping furniture for profit? Who hasn’t scrolled through Instagram and wondered how hard it is to actually take that dated, scratched and chipped nightstand (or table or chair) and turn it into that work of art with acid cleaned hardware and perfect coat?

It’s actually pretty hard–at least in the beginning, if you don’t have any experience. You can absolutely learn and people make very good money doing high-end full furniture makeovers, either painting or restoring and staining. But if you want to make a lot of money flipping furniture, and you are a DIY furniture makeover beginner, there’s a faster way to make money. In fact, if you flip furniture for profit doing these makeovers, then you could transition to those lower volume, higher profit full makeovers. But if you’re just starting your furniture flipping business, or you just want to make money faster, then we recommend our “mini makeovers”. Keep reading to see these mini makeovers–quick and easy furniture makeovers you can do in a weekend.

You can make more money flipping furniture without doing full furniture makeovers.

Here’s the problem with full furniture makeovers. If you are doing that on nights and weekends, it will take months to learn to do it at that level. On top of that, even when you can do it well, some steps just take a lot of time. You would probably need two or three weekends, minimum, to makeover the piece. At that rate, if you sold that one set at $800 and you sold it right away, you would be capped at $800 to $1600 per month. It’s just hard to scale a business that takes that long.

Even if you got to three or four a month, because you are now doing it full time, you won’t be able to scale too much. Or, you probably can, but it takes a lot of knowledge that if you don’t have already (we don’t), means it’s definitely a long game. Your hourly rate, if you look at it that way, is going to be profit per piece (after cost of supplies and furniture) divided by the hours it took you to make it over. It doesn’t mean people aren’t making very good money with those amazingly restored furniture. The point is just to be clear–we don’t. And you don’t have to, either. Especially if you just started a furniture flipping business and want to increase profits fast.

The other way to think about it is that in the beginning of your furniture flipping business, you can make money faster if you can turn over your inventory more quickly. Super quick and easy furniture makeovers can be a great way to flip furniture for profit. If you can do it faster, you’re making more per hour. And if you can price competitively, you can sell faster too. This helps you build some cash flow faster: you’re going for high volume, low margin at this point.

Fast and easy furniture makeovers expand the market for your furniture flipping business.

The other idea behind furniture makeovers is thinking about who you’re selling to. For us, we think of two markets: 1) people who are looking for a bargain for themselves, or 2) people who want the item mostly because of the specific item.

Whenever you paint a table or nightstand in your furniture flipping business, you are making a decision for the buyer.

Group #1 is often buying utilitarian items. They have a specific need: they need a pair of nightstands, or a kitchen table, or bar stools. They aren’t browsing or decorating: they need bedroom storage, or a place to eat or sit. As we have written before, it doesn’t mean the buyer is on a strict budget generally, that they are “cheap” or have limited means. We have had people buy our $40 tables…for their second home. People put different values on things: many people would prefer to get something pre-owned, especially solid wood well-made furniture. And, some people can afford second homes by filling them with $40 tables! These fast and easy makeovers can help you grow your furniture flipping business faster. Neutral, solid wood pieces tend to be great fast sellers.

Furniture flipping has two customer bases: those buying for a need and those buying for a want.

Group #2 is not as price sensitive. They are decorating, or choosing the perfect piece of furniture, not just something to do the job. We see this group a lot with home decor. They are looking for a vintage brass lamp—they’re probably not looking for lighting in general, they have a specific aesthetic they want. Same for anyone buying vintage pottery or specific collectors items like Waterford or Longaberger. They might want furniture, but you will probably sell them a specific item. Buyers like these are looking for a vintage rocking chair, or midcentury modern table. For these buyers, we really want to do the basic maintenance makeover. We might just do small repairs and a light staining, not painting.

Furniture makeovers for profit are best in neutral colors so buyers can picture the piece in their home.

So, there is a third group, which is people who also want to flip. For us, one of our customer bases are people who can do furniture makeovers at a really high level. For those people, we are just a middleman. We might get a piece for free, or very affordably up to about $15. We would turn around and sell those pieces “as is” for about $20 to $100.

That’s a huge range because these customers are pricing what they can turn around and get for it once they do a full scale furniture makeover. A pair of dining chairs, even if someone wanted to redo them at an amazing makeover level, have a fairly low upper limit to that resale value. Whereas decent nightstands, then repainted or restored to a high level, can go for hundreds of dollars. We’ve sold “as is” nightstands for as much as $125, but they were Thomasville and in great condition. In the right hands, they could have been fully redone and sold for more than $500 where we live.

But, what we discovered was a happy medium between selling a piece literally “as is” for up to $20 as opposed to the time it takes to do a full furniture makeover to make a profit. So instead we began doing mini makeovers. This meant we appealed to both people who just need a piece now and don’t want to spend even a minute sanding or painting. And it also appealed to our customers who might want to do something more with it, but kept it basic enough they could see the potential.

A mini makeover will increase your furniture flipping profits without adding a lot of time.

What do we mean by a mini makeover? For us it just means fixing, sanding and doing light repairs, if necessary. And then painting it a solid color, usually black or white. When we say repairs: think almost ridiculous-not-really-repairs. We’re talking tightening screws, gluing a piece of trim, a little wood putty in a nick—really small stuff like that. But, if you are selling furniture and home decor for a profit, you don’t want to have to caveat in your listings. You want to be able to say “stable, no wobbling” and “no major chips or large scratches.”

The point of mini makeovers is quick and easy furniture makeovers that appeal to a wide range of buyers.

The biggest change is the paint. But here’s the important thing to keep in mind: all you are trying to do is make the furniture a useful, neutral piece. This can hugely improve the number of customers who are interested. Even though most of our mini makeovers take anywhere from 15 minutes to a few hours, people pay more to have it done. In other words, we literally just painted some pieces by spray painting over some light scratches. But for less than half a can of spray paint, we took some barstools we bought for $15 and turned them into a $50 sale.

We have had the same results with end tables and nightstands. Just a can of black paint can radically change the way furniture looks.

Take this brown coffee table that we got for free:

I mean, to be fair, it looks like a curbside find table, right? There’s a lot of scratches, the design is now a bit dated, and the top had a thin veneer layer that allowed almost no sanding. As is, this piece would probably only appeal as a project piece to our high end furniture makeover crowd. But the reality is, a coffee table like this probably wouldn’t appeal to most high end furniture makeover customers. It’s too specific—go look at any of your favorite Insta artists and look at the furniture they do. A lot of nightstands, dressers, and pairs of end tables. A sort of modern long coffee table? Not so much.

Black is a great color for quick and easy furniture makeovers by beginners.

But. By painting it a solid black, we now appealed to the crowd that wants a good economically priced piece of furniture but also solid wood and in good condition. While the current brown scratched table screams “free off the street,” a basic mini makeover changes the look completely, to this:

There’s not much that we did to this table. We patched with wood putty a few of the deepest scratches, and sanded down some ligher ones. Then we painted it black. And that’s it. This is our early scrappy days and our staging is pretty woeful. But it sold for $60. In its original brown and scratched condition, we probably couldn’t have gotten more than $25.

Quick and easy furniture makeovers like these can level up your curbside find to a better profit.

These little mini easy and fast furniture makeovers or “maintenance makeovers” aren’t meant to be huge moneymakers on a per item basis. This is still a high volume product compared to the high-end furniture makeovers. Whether you scale the mini makeover method or use it as an early stage strategy, it’s a great DIY furniture hack for beginners. If you are just starting your furniture flipping business this lets you take advantage of curbside finds or other free items, yet not push your makeover skills. And the only tools you need is paint, a brush and sandpaper. Maybe some wood putty. But most curbside will benefit from at least a mini makeover, and it will drastically increase how much you get for it.

Again, these fast and easy furniture makeovers take less than a weekend. In fact, they can take less than an hour! Even this table took only about 90 minutes for the first coat. Yet the transformation is amazing: that pine color with the very specific green would only appeal to a small audience. But the black version is suddenly universal.

Going to basic black made a massive difference. Now it’s suitable for a variety of rooms and a lot of different purposes. It’s décor neutral. Now it can be a gaming station or entry table or mudroom station or accent table in the living room or man cave table or…you get the idea. It’s a great economical purchase for anyone who wants really good furniture for an affordable price.

Black paint tends to be easier for furniture makeover beginners.

Another thing is that black paint tends to be more forgiving. Brush strokes are less obvious, scratches beneath are minimized, and you can usually touch it up without it appearing uneven. So black paint also made it a great choice if you are a beginner at furniture makeovers. So, if you want to be really scrappy and only get one can of paint–go black.

White is a good neutral option for quick and easy furniture makeovers, although black is slightly more versatile.

Here is an example in white. At some point we started to trend toward black paint more than white paint. There were a couple of reasons: more furniture looks okay in black than in white. If we really only wanted to have one color on hand, few things look odd in black. Bar stools, dining chairs, end tables and nightstands are all absolutely fine in black. But, a coffee table, for example, is almost always not a great choice for white paint.

In most cases, you can do a fast furniture makeover with white paint. But, be aware that dark finishes are more likely to bleed through.

This table was a garage sale find for $8. You just can’t leave an $8 solid wood table in good condition, at least if you’re still in a scrappy, building some start up capital. Now in theory, we probably could have sold as is for $20. The downside is the lines of this table, and the fact that there is only one, means our project piece people would be less interested in painting it to a high level. And for the buyer looking for something they could use right away, the color is a bit dated. So, we could have gone black or white.

But we went white because we thought it might work in a large breakfast or kitchen area, since there was only one. Black suggests a bedroom or living room setting, and then a buyer would likely want a pair. As for the actual mini makeover, this was as mini as they come. This table was in very good condition, no scratches or nicks. Really it’s only crime was dated design and color, and we could change the latter. We spray painted this in about 20 minutes. The white turned out well:

We sold this white accent table for $35. Quick and easy furniture makeovers like this are great for fast profits, especially if you are DIY furniture hack beginner. Ultimately you might learn to be an Insta artist with great furniture makeovers that are next level. Or you might decide to keep doing super fast and fabulous makeovers like this that can increase profits for your furniture flipping business. We definitely think you can make more money faster in the beginning with these mini makeovers.

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This article is about how to do quick and easy furniture makeovers as a beginner.