Buy home essentials

Here's where to buy home goods and furniture in the UK.

• Charity shops for pre-loved bargains. They’re everywhere, and you can find some real gems. The British Heart Foundation and Emmaus specialise in furniture and will usually deliver for you.

• Gumtree, eBay, Facebook Marketplace and local buy/sell groups on Facebook (search for your area) are all good options for buying pre-loved bargains online.

• Freecycle. A website where people give stuff away for free. Ninety-nine per cent garbage; occasional gems. 

• IKEA. Affordable Swedish design megastore full of nifty flatpack things you assemble yourself (if you’re busy/lazy, you can hire someone to do the assembling for you through an app called Taskrabbit).

• John Lewis. Generally lovely, high-quality homeware (South Africans, this is the closest equivalent in quality to a Woolworths). They’re a department store, so they sell other brands’ products and can get pricey. Their house brand Anyday is good value for the money, though. 

• Wayfair, Dunelm and Next. Giant homeware stores, variable quality, pretty affordable.

• Made, Swoon and Loaf. Midrange designery-looking stuff, what thirty-somethings buy when they’ve become too posh for IKEA.

• TK Maxx. A department store that sells overstock and discounted items from big brands. Great bargains to be found, but you never know what you’re going to get.

• Wilko. Affordable gadgets and homeware.

• H&M Home, Oliver Bonas and Zara Home. Good places to find trendy accessories.

• Home Essentials. Department store that also offers appliances.

• Argos. Like Amazon for Boomers, where you order things from a giant catalogue and collect them from a counter. They offer good warrantees on appliances.

• Etsy, for unique handcrafted stuff and vintage items.

• Vinterior, for quality vintage items (sometimes with a hefty price tag).

• All the big supermarkets sell homeware. If you’re on a real budget, try Sainsbury’s, Asda, Tesco and Aldi.

• Amazon. You can buy literally anything you can think of. But does Jeff Bezos really need more money?

  
  

When considering a shopping strategy, there are three variables you could optimise for, and you're allowed to choose two of them: quick, cheap and well-made. ‘Quick’ here means ‘you can get everything you need from one shop’ rather than potentially spending several hours finding a good deal.

• Value quick + cheap? Go to IKEA, Amazon, or Wayfair.

• Value quick + well-made? Go to John Lewis. You can get everything you need in one place, and you will get good-quality pieces, but stuff won’t be cheap.

• Value cheap + well-made? Buy second-hand. You can pick up some bargains, but it will take you some time to find what you want. This route has the extra advantage of being the most planet-friendly. 

New home kits

If your timing is tight, you might want to consider ‘new home kits’ that you can schedule to arrive on your first day in a new place and which contain everything you’ll need for the first couple of weeks in one simple box. The most popular one is from a company called Noah. You could also go to a big shopping centre or store like IKEA, where you can buy all your essentials at once, but you’ll need to consider how you’re going to get it all back home (e.g. get an Uber van or ask a friend to drive you). 

Buying a mattress

There are a lot of direct-to-consumer mattress companies like Emma and Simba. They’re … fine? We had an Emma mattress for two years then upgraded. I actually suggest going to a physical mattress shop if you can, so you can jump lie on them and figure out what you like.