Philadelphia DIYer Theresa Clement rescued a $35 glassless china cabinet from Habitat ReStore and rebuilt it as a bookshelf; the makeover took about 6 hours

A disheveled mission-style china cabinet languished in a Habitat for Humanity ReStore in Philadelphia, with no glasses, shelves, a door that refused to open, and a price tag of $35 that most passed by without a second glance. Theresa Clement, a DIY blogger, contractor, and lifelong tool enthusiast, saw a bookshelf waiting to happen. Six hours, a can of cobalt-blue spray paint, and some scraps of pallet wood later, that's exactly what it became.

It's a tale as small as your local community, and yet it also happens to align with a growing national trend. According to the 2025 Recommerce Report by OfferUp and GlobalData, 93% of U.S. consumers bought something secondhand in the past year and the value of the recommerce economy (with furniture as a key component) has surpassed $200 billion. Clement's cabinet upgrade is just one person's snapshot of where many in America's furniture space are quietly coming from.

The makeover


Clement's process was refreshingly unspectacular: light sanding and priming, a coat of spray paint on the exterior, taping off the edge boards and using pallet wood cut to size for shelves. There was no need for custom cabinetry, just patience, primer, and the willingness to look beyond a "broken" object at what it could become. That's the part that gets lost in the 15-second reels, the less glamorous parts that actually take time and a little mess, standing in the garage while paint dries tacky.

Why this generation is buying broken things on purpose

Today, millennials and Gen Z have stopped apologizing for it. According to the same 2025 Recommerce Report by OfferUp and GlobalData, 44% of millennials and 54% of Gen Z buy their furniture secondhand more often and 70% of respondents claim that the stigma had faded away just within the last year. The economic realities of rent and starter-home prices also factor in (a $35 cabinet is much cheaper than anything at a big box store), but part of the appeal is the desire to break away from the cookie-cutter look of flat-pack furniture that everyone is buying from the same catalog.

Looking back, here's the hook that makes this more than just a story of saving money. According to a 2011 landmark study titled “The IKEA effect: When labor leads to love,” by Norton, Mochon and Ariely, published in the Journal of Consumer Psychology, people are willing to pay significantly more for objects they've built or modified (their study used boxes and Lego sets) versus ones they've simply bought, a phenomenon the researchers dubbed the IKEA effect. It's a slightly ironic name to reach for here, given a flat-pack furniture giant lent its name to the very psychology behind a project built specifically to escape flat-pack furniture, but the finding holds regardless of the label. Simply building something and then seeing it as your own increased the value in their eyes. That cobalt-blue cabinet will always feel more valuable to Clement than some $400 bookshelf she bought from a catalog, and science backs it up.

The part you may have ignored

Here's where a little skepticism is necessary: a $35 cabinet is not actually a $35 project after you factor in the primer, spray paint, sandpaper, a saw you may not own, and the six-plus hours you're not getting paid for. Furniture flipping also assumes good bones to begin with, solid wood not particle board that's already coming apart. And it assumes the sheer volume of furniture Americans are tossing isn't a problem worth naming: the EPA reports that furniture generated 12.1 million tons of waste in a single year, with over 80% of it landfilled instead of reused or recycled.

Not every curbside find is worthy of a second life; pretending otherwise is what fills up garages with unfinished projects. If you have a spare Saturday, a driveway and a truly sturdy piece that someone gave up on, yes, probably. Just realize it's a project, not a 60-second transformation, and the $35 sticker price wasn't the point.