Our Costs for Furnishing a 5-Bedroom House

You’re here for the numbers, so we’ll dive right in.

This is for a 5-bedroom, 3 bath home that has a “main house” and a “casita”. Total square footage is just shy of 3,000. The property essentially has 2 full kitchens (the only thing that makes the “kitchenette” not a real kitchen is it has no oven – everything else is the same as what you’d find in a full-size size, fully stocked kitchen). There are two laundry rooms as well as two living rooms; we put large entertainment centers and 65-inch smart TVs in both.

I’ve noted brands/suppliers when I can remember them. All costs are rounded up.

Furniture (Designs West): $8,805

Furniture (American Furniture Warehouse): $1,146

Barstools (7): $368

Patio furniture (one dining set and 4 Adirondack chairs): $1,000

TVs: $800

Routers and Wii sytems: $150

Mattresses (Simmons) and covers (Malouf): $5,500

Linens (London Fog and Malouf bedding, Member’s Mark towels): $1,178

Pillows: $200

Curtain rods: $600

Curtains (Smart Sheer brand sheer curtains and Quinn brand blackout curtains, 12 windows and 2 glass doors): $1,200

Kitchens (including 2 full sets of Correlle dish ware, Chicago Cutlery, Oneida silverware, and Cuisinart cookware/cooking utensils): $1,579

Wall art: $400

Pack ‘n’ Plays (2): $96

Refillable necessities (bought in bulk) such as soaps, detergents, toilet paper: $300

Other bed/bath items (box fans, laundry baskets, hair dryers): $650

Other (cleaning equipment/supplies, miscellaneous): $561

Extra money in case we decide to buy things later that aren’t on this list: $3,000

That grand total comes to $27,533.

Having never furnished anything from scratch before and wanting it all to be decently nice, we budgeted $50k for this whole ordeal. We also just found out we got a $18.8k refund from our contractor for unused funds, so I’ve gone back to the post about the costs of this build and adjusted that.

All that leftover money gives us a good financial buffer for the property as we get it up and running in the rental market. We created an LLC for it and it has its own checking account now (highly recommend doing both of those things if you have a rental property).

Whatever is truly leftover after next month is going straight toward our goal of paying off our other rental property (a townhome in the Chicago area) by the end of this year.

Stay tuned for future posts about gross and net income from this property as we get it renting for “tourist season”!