No matter how much you’d like to “make do” with what you have, there are times when you could reallly use some replacement furniture.

The problem, of course, is that furniture stores are specially designed to rip open your wallet and to remove everything in it except for your receipt from the gas station. New furniture costs money. In many cases, it costs way too much money.

Luckily, those what a frugal streak have a great alternative to squandering a small fortune on furniture. They can buy used and end up with something that’s probably better than what they’d be able to spend on a new item.

Let’s illustrate with a nifty hypothetical example. Let’s say you want a new desk. Your old one has fallen apart and simply can’t be repaired. Are you going to run off to Nebraska Furniture Mart to buy a new one? No. You’ll fight that instinct. You’ll also fight the urge to spend about $300 to $400 on a pretty run-of-the mill desk from JC Penney’s.

Instead, you’ll take a trip to your local thrift store. You’ll find a wooden desk and you’ll pay somewhere in the neighborhood of thirty bucks for it. If you live in an area with more upscale thrift shopping, you might get stung for as much as sixty five.

“Aha”, the doubters are saying, “That’s fine. You’ve saved a little money. However, you have merely replaced one piece of junk with another piece of junk. In the long run, you’d be better off buying new because the new item will last!”

That’s a fine argument, at face value, but it’s flawed on a few levels. First, the old furniture you find in thrift stores is often made from higher quality materials. You can find a real wood desk instead of one of those laminated particle board disasters. It will last. Oh, and by the time we’re done with it, it will be as good as new.

We’re going to assume you have some basic level of hand-eye coordination and a willingness to invest a few hours of your life in order to save a few hundred bucks. Just to make this hypothetical completely believable, though, we’ll also assume that you don’t have much in the way of tools or equipment at your place.

So, let’s make a trip to the hardware store. You can find a sander for less if you shop, but Home Depot has a $40 sander that isn’t at the bottom of the quality charts. You can invest another five bucks in sandpaper. Let’s say stain and finish will run you a ten-spot. Oh, let’s not forget–another five for brushes and we’ll even set aside another ten for a few replacement knobs, wood glue, an odd screw here or there and whatever other incidentals might be necessary.

Before you know it, you’ll have that thrift store desk sitting on newspapers in the garage or basement. You will have scraped and/or sanded it back down to bare wood, stained it your ideal color and sealed it with a nice finish. You will have repaired the solid wood furniture and it will be looking better than anything you could have found on the floor of a furniture store. A few hours of work, a day of waiting for everything to dry, and you’re in business.

Total cost (assuming a $25 desk purchase): $95

Total savings (vs. run-of-the-mill Penney’s desk): $205 – $305

Result: Better furniture at a cheaper price. And a sense of satisfaction in both the handiwork and the savings.

Living frugally doesn’t mean living with junk. It means finding ways to get good, solid, useful and even good-looking things when you need them at a fraction of the cost.