Anyone who works in the TV industry knows that relocation from one market to another is just another part of the job description. KTTV’s new entertainment reporter Julie Chang, in a profile by Daily News Los Angeles, shows how she furnished her new home without draining her bank account.
When Chang recently made the trek from New York to Los Angeles after being hired as the entertainment anchor and reporter for FOX owned KTTV, she decided it would be cheaper to start over rather than paying the high cost of shipping furniture from coast to coast.
While TVSpy is aware the numbers in Chang’s budget would be six months of salary for many new reporters or anchors in smaller markets, the article has some good ideas for finding deals on furnishings.
Chang gave local designer Hillary Thomas and her team a budget of $10,000 to $15,000 with clippings from magazines along with pictures of her old smaller space in New York. The designer came up with a plan to find furnishings from flea markets, estate sales and discount retailers like Ikea, Cost Plus World Markets, etsy.com and overstock.com, that would fill the space with high-end style at a low-end rate.
“If you take out the services part of it, it’s so shoestring in a sense,” Chang told the Daily News. “I know plenty of people who spent $3,000 to $5,000 just on a coffee table. So to think that I spent what people who really care about design would spend on a couch, on a coffee table, on a table to furnish a two-bedroom apartment I feel like we really stretched it and we were very resourceful.”
For artwork, the designer relied on her client’s hobby, “One of the things to point out about this project is that Julie loves to travel all over the place and take incredible photography,” Thomas told the Daily News. “So one of the ways that we were able to fill in a lot of fine spaces was using a lot of her pictures and incorporating them in very inexpensive ways.”
The article gives an extensive list of what went into the design as well as links to help you shop for yourself. Click here to view the article.