Maggie McGough says reselling furniture is environmentally friendly, anyone can do it, and best of all, it's fun — plus, it's made her quite famous.
FORT WORTH, Texas — For Maggie McGough, the cliché rings true: “One man's trash is another man's treasure.”
For McGough, that's almost literal.
Her current favorite hobby began in 2020, when McGough's husband was looking for something he and his wife could do and suggested they look for unwanted furniture in the neighborhood and resell it.
It was something he did before they met.
So they hopped in the truck and McGough resold the pieces he found in someone's trash on the side of the road. They sold them for $50.
“It wasn't a huge amount of money,” McGaugh said, “but I wanted to be creative and I like making money, so I got hooked right away.”
With a degree in marketing and experience in social media management, reselling furniture wasn't even on McGough's horizons, but after a few videos went viral, she now has more than 1 million followers on Instagram and TikTok, and nearly 500,000 on Facebook, and reselling other people's junk has become her full-time job.
While the “reselling” part may be as easy as it sounds, finding the furniture wasn't always that easy. McGough said he spent a lot of time researching the bulk drop-off rules in different cities and regions, and which neighborhoods had unwanted furniture worth salvaging.
“I needed to know which neighborhoods in Fort Worth were picking up trash,” McGough said, “and I could see which neighborhoods in the city were picking up the most trash. And I could see that the first and third week was picking up the most trash.”
Not everything is worth picking up. McGough is quick to remind people that whether they're living in a mansion or a single-family home, they can introduce things like bedbugs and fleas, which is why she tends to be cautious about upholstered chairs, sofas, and other fabric items. She mostly sticks to sturdier materials, like those made from real wood.
McGough says that if something can't be reused or redecorated – or she simply doesn't want to deal with it anymore – she puts it in a bulky waste collection for other furniture hunters to find.
McGough said encouraging the scavenger hunt will make his life more difficult, but he believes anyone can do what he does.
“I used to be that girl who wanted to be creative but didn't know how to do it,” McGough said. “I often get comments on my videos that say, 'I want to do this, but I'm not creative enough.' That's the biggest excuse you give yourself, because I've been there too. But creativity can develop.”
McGough says turning trash into treasure is a great hobby, a steady source of income, a much-needed creative outlet and also an environmentally friendly way to spend time.
Since moving into furniture reselling full time and building a career in social media, McGough has created online courses that teach students how to find furniture worth reselling, how to look at furniture to determine how to reuse and sell it, and how to determine how much to spend on each piece of furniture to sell.
To learn more about McGaugh and her online courses, visit her website