we get all of our furniture from resale stores - way less expensive than buying new
A BIG +1 for this. I use Craigslist on my furniture/some home furnishings purchases. I avoid sofas/mattresses, but I have bought my dining room set, dining room buffet, a few end tables, a few lamps, a bedroom bed frame/bedroom furniture, pool table, foosball table, ping pong table, air hockey table, and TV entertainment center from Craigslist.
It all started when my sister/BIL gave me their dining room set when they were moving. Only issue is that it had 5 chairs (6th chair had a bad leg). To buy 3 replacement chairs to make a set of 8 (or even just 1 to make a set of 6) was going to cost me about $100/chair, even for the ultra cheapest of the cheapest at WalMart.
I had used Craigslist before a few times, and figured "why not look at furniture?"
In short, it blows anything else out of the water, because not only can you find EXCELLENT condition furniture for 75% off of buying new (or even much more than 75% off, figuring in taxes and buying all new), but even better: your selection is tremendously greater! I found a great modern dining room set that I never would have been able to find in my city, let alone scouring the net for countless hours to check out just a few websites. When you have just maybe 5-6 furniture stores to choose from (all of which have roughly simliar inventory), it pales in comparison to hundreds of people selling in that category, who have a wide array of sources: some from the East coast, some from the West coast, some are 50 year old sets, some are 100 years old, some 20 years old, some modern, some antique, etc.