Woman buys her $80,000 dream house in Nashville. It all started with trading a single hairpin

Demi Skipper started her "Trade Me Project" back in 2020. She began with a one-cent bobby-pin listing on Craigslist, which soon turned into something much bigger. Several trades later, she has bartered her way up to an $80,000 house.

"After 28 trades and all the ups and downs, I finally did it," Skipper says in a video that she posted in 2021. The video shows her in front of her two-bedroom detached house near Nashville, Tennessee.

The home was exchanged for a trailer, which she got by trading a tractor, which was preceded by trades that included, jewelry, MacBooks, a snowboard, and a set of margarita glasses, Skipper told CNBC Make It.

Skipper was heavily motivated after she saw a TED Talk by Kyle MacDonald, a Canadian who bartered his way to a home in 2006. "The moment I realized no one else had done this since, I was like, 'OK, I have to do this,'" Skipper says. She kept a couple of things in mind which included not paying for anything except for shipping. She also made sure that she traded things with somebody she already knew.

Skipper started with zero followers on social media, but immediately started attracting people. "I think it was just crazy enough of an idea that people were thinking, 'I don’t think she’ll do this, but I want to watch to see if she does,'" she says.

One of the major things that she learned was that everybody was a trader and people were not limited to sites like Craigslist and Facebook marketplace. "Sometimes I’d have thousands of options and sometimes I didn’t have many," says Skipper.

At times, Skipper was putting up to more than 40 hours a week into her passion project on top of working as a product manager. She spent a lot of time seeking out buyers and arranging the items to be shipped from one place to another. "This was part of the challenge," says Skipper. "But I was prepared to go five years."

She says it was easier when she started, but it became harder once the value of the items she was trading increased. "When I had the bobby pin, I was like, ‘Give me anything.’ But as you get to $10,000, very few people have things lying around their house that they can trade with," she tells the publication. 

In another video, she gives a full house tour. The house opens in the main living room with wall-to-wall hardwood floors. Just after the living room, there's the kitchen with enough room for a small table. The house has two bedrooms, with proper carpet and a full-size closet. The second bedroom is just down the corridor, with a big closet. The second bedroom also has a view of the backyard. Lastly, there's the bathroom with a tub.

In the video, she tells her viewers that they will soon be moving in and giving the house a complete makeover, only to announce in another video that she gave away the house to a follower in exchange for a bobby pin. You can watch her give away the house here.

“I’m going to give this house to somebody who really needs it in Tennessee. They are going to trade me a bobby pin and then I’m going to do the whole thing over."