TikToker successfully trades up from a bobby pin to a HOUSE in just 28 swaps – Daily Mail

A San Francisco woman who started with just a bobby pin and spent a year and a half trading it up for increasingly bigger and more valuable items has finally reached her goal — and is now the proud owner of a house in Tennessee. 

Demi Skipper, 30, started the Trade Me Project on TikTok and Instagram on May 26, 2020 with the plan of making multiple trades to turn her worthless bobby pin into her own home — upgrading the bobby pin to shoes, electronics, and even cars along the way.

By last December, she’d traded up to a Wildbound Tiny Cabin — but she had her hear set on a bigger, more permanent home, and continued to trade up for a Honda CRV, three tractors, a Chipotle celebrity card, and a $40,000 trailer with a Tesla Powerwall 2.

Finally, on the day after Thanksgiving, she made her final trade, swapping the trailer for her very own house near Nashville which she and her husband will soon call home. 

Demi explained on TikTok that she was looking for something to do during the pandemic when she was struck with the idea. 

‘I’m trading a bobby pin up until I get a house,’ she said in her inaugural video.

Using platforms like Craigslist, eBay, and Facebook, Demi is offering to trade one item at a time, with the intent of trading up little by little and eventually ending up with a house — all from that single bobby pin.

Over the course of 28 trades, she went from a bobby pin to earrings, to an Xbox One, to several cars, to a tiny cabin to the penultimate trade: a $40,000 trailer.

More recently, she made it up to some seriously big-ticket items, including three red tractors, which she traded for a Chipotle celebrity card in a sponsored video that helped get her closer to her goal.

She then traded that card — which netted a year of free food, plus a catered party — for a $40,000 trailer with a Tesla Powerwall 2.

Millions have followed her story, and late last month, she got a message from man who flips houses in Tennessee.

He said he had been watching her trading up and would like to end her journey by giving her a house for the trailer.  

Demi shipped the trailer to him, then flew to Nashville and drove to nearby Clarksville to get the keys to her new house.  

In a video she uploaded on December 11, she shows the moment she saw her house for the first time.

‘Oh my God,’ she says. ‘I can’t believe this. A year and a half of trading a single bobby pin until I get a house, and I’ve done it. And look at it, this just shows you — it’s possible!’

Speaking to NBC News, Demi said the whole thing has been ‘so surreal.’ 

‘People really have doubted me, and I certainly did at times during the journey, too,’ she said. ‘But I learned a lot about myself in the process, and I was really amazed by my ability to stick with it.’

Demi and her husband are now planning to relocate from California to Tennessee to live in their house — and then she plans to start all over again, with the intention of donating the next home she scores to someone who needs it. 

‘There’s been a couple of people who have done this once, but no one’s crazy enough to do it twice,’ she said.   

Demi’s trading game started out with baby steps, swapping that bobby pin for a pair of Marysol earrings worth $10.

She traded those for a set of four margarita glasses worth $24, and those for a $60 Bissell vacuum cleaner.

Demi managed to get someone in need of a carpet cleaning to give her a $95 snowboard for the vacuum, and then traded that snowboard for a $180 Apple TV 4K.

‘This trade, specifically, was one of my most valuable so far,’ she said in a TikTok video at the time.

She went on to trade the Apple TV for $220 Bose noise-cancelling headphones, and those headphones for an Xbox One, two games, two controllers, and a Kinect sensor bar valued at $320. 

Demi then found a guy who ‘really wanted the Xbox’ — so much so that he was willing to trade her a MacBook Pro 2011 valued at $400.

That was swapped for a $550 Canon camera set, which became the first item she had to spend any money on because she had to ship the laptop. 

That was followed by a $750 pair of Off White Nike Blazers in a men’s size nine, a pair of Off White Nike Hyperdunks, and Jordan 1 Reverse Shattered Backboards.

Here, though, she was stuck in the ‘sneaker game,’ making repeated trades with sneaker fans. She wanted to get out, so when she found someone who desperately wanted those Jordan 1 Reverse Shattered Backboards, she told him what she wanted: an iPhone 11 Pro Max. 

That man went out and bought the new phone, and they made the trade. 

Her next trade may not have been the biggest value, but it was certainly the most impressive at that point: She swapped that iPhone for a car — specifically, a 2008 Dodge Caravan. 

She then traded the car for a $1,400 Boosted Board V3 Plus, and that for a 15” MacBook Pro 2017.

‘Can you believe this MacBook Pro was once a BOBBY PIN?! I still have to pinch myself,’ she wrote on Instagram, showing off her newest item, which came still in the box.

Next up, she swapped the computer for an electric bike food truck, valued at anywhere from $1,800 to $4,000.

That got her back to cars, when she traded the bike for a Mini Cooper convertible.

But after she traded the car for a diamond and sapphire necklace appraised at $19,500, she suffered a setback: She learned that despite the appraisal value, the retail value of the necklace was just $2,500.

Still, she kept trading, swapping that necklace for a brand new Peloton workout bike, worth $1,895.

That Peloton was traded for a Mustang, which was traded for a 2011 Jeep Patriot with 145,000 miles on it, which was finally traded for her first taste of a home: a tiny cabin Wildbound Cabin Co.  

According to the company’s website, those tiny pull-along cabins start at $9,500.

The interior was about as big as half a shared college dorm room, with enough space for a bed and a countertop. 

Next, she traded the cabin for a Honda CRV — which, it turned out, needed a bit of work. Luckily, Demi’s viral status meant that an auto shop was willing to partner with her to fix it up.

She then traded the car for three red tractors, valued at $37,000 each.

It didn’t take long before Chipotle reached out about taking the trailers off her hands for the brand’s farmers to use.

In return, they gave her a Chipotle celebrity card, which gives the cardholder free Chipotle for a year — as well as a catered dinner for 50. 

Demi found a Chipotle superfan to take the card in exchange for off-the-grid trailer worth $40,000.

It took weeks of paperwork to get the trailer from Canada, but she showed it off once it was in the US.

The impressive trailer comes with a $10,000 Tesla Powerwall 2, solar panels, and a walk-in fridge, and it gets all its power off-grid.

That trailer is what finally got Demi to a house just under three weeks ago.

Demi’s journey certainly proved popular, and she has amassed 5 million followers on TikTok and hundreds of thousands on Instagram. 

Demi said she was inspired by entrepreneur Kyle MacDonald, who managed to trade a red paperclip for a two-story farmhouse in 14 steps in 2006.

MacDonald spent just a year on the 14 trades, going from the paperclip to a fish pen, a door knob, a coleman stove, a red generator, an ‘instant party kit,’ a Bombardier Mach 1 snowmobile, a holiday to Yahk, a cube van, a recording contract, a year’s free rental in Arizona, an afternoon with Alice Cooper, a Kiss snow globe, and a part in the movie Donna on Demand. 

After one year of internet bartering, Kyle — who was 26 at the time — completed the deal and moved into a two-story, three-bedroom farmhouse in Kipling, Canada.    

‘I’m really pleased. I’ve never been to Kipling, but I’ve seen pictures of the house, and it looks great. It looks perfect,’ he said at the time.

The inspiration for the project was a children’s game called ‘Bigger and Better.’ Growing up in the suburbs of Vancouver, he watched children go door to door trying to trade their toys for something more valuable. 

‘I didn’t know how I was going to get to my goal of house, or how long it would take me, or where the house would be, but I figured that if I kept at it, I would get there in the end,’ he said. 

The town of Kipling decided to make the offer for the publicity, Mayor Pat Jackson said.

‘We are a small community, just over 1,100 people. We are trying to promote tourism. And who knows, maybe someone out there will think, “This sounds like an interesting town,” and decide to move here. That would be just wonderful,’ he said.   

MacDonald has inspired several other people to make massive trades as well.

An anonymous software engineer from Northern Ireland began trading with an old pencil and now has a handcrafted table worth hundreds of dollars.

The 28-year-old is on a mission to help people in need by bartering his way to a million dollars online and donating the proceeds to charity, and is documenting his journey on Instagram. 

The project began in October, after the man discovered the old pencil at the bottom of his bag. 

He traded it first for a single King Edwards cigar worth $6.00, then swapped that for a signed children’s book donated by author Mikael Lindnord worth an estimated $25, and then traded that for a set of Rubik’s cubes worth $29.99. 

The anonymous man continues to trade, getting a box of 12 DavidOff Nicaragua Diademas Cigars priced at $230; a rare, out-of-print hardback copy of Buffy Season 9, Volume 3; and a Skinny Dip London gift card for $325.

His last update was in April, when he traded that gift card for aLive Edge Walnut side table that was handcrafted from a single piece in Ohio.

The anonymous trader believes that getting to a million dollars will take around ten years, and he has already been offered some bizarre items, such as sex toys and guns. 

Speaking to Metro, he said: ‘I have to be really careful when deciding what to trade, I am always after something that appeals to a wide range of people. I am in negotiations right now.’