We recently moved and had to furnish a whole new house. We had some minor stuff of our own from before like a desk, an office chair, some drawers and a TV, but not even a bed otherwise.
Save for a new bed matress, we bought it all second hand, off local thrift groups, in thrift stores etc etc:
nice hardwood bed frame for $30
a beautiful vintage "rococo-style" desk for $80
two vintage chairs in the same style for $30
this one is more expensive, but absolutely beautiful: a copper-plated coffe table with a world map motif for $100
vintage 2 person sofa, still same fucken style, $50
vintage drawer $40, another one in a different style for a different room but also similar price
rustic kitchen table $40
6 fitting chairs for the kitchen $40
cute corner cupboard $10
free bookshelf
...and more. We are now fully furnished, and really nicely so (seriously, it's beautiful furniture), and it all went for under $700. Now this is over like 5-6 months and took us a fair amount of looking, but we needed to just browse the thrift sites and have access to a car for easy transport, ppl offload really beautiful shit for cheap all the time.
Though now that I think of it, we did buy also a few rugs and some other minor shit that probably runs up like another $200 or so, and we got some old trash from my parents before we changed it out for better shit (and also, the thrifted kitchen chairs were found by them)