It’s the house that TikTok built.
A California woman is now a happy homeowner after trading up increasingly more expensive items over the past year and a half — starting with just a hairpin.
Demi Skipper, 30, declared on TikTok in May 2020 that she would swap her way up to a home — and did just that the day after Thanksgiving.
Skipper told The Post that she’s had the home value assessed and it’s worth $80,000 in its current state.
“It has two bedrooms and one bathroom as well as a giant backyard,” she said.
In the months since she began, Skipper, who lives in San Francisco, acquired everything from a Peloton bike to a diamond necklace, using each item to score a bigger, better asset. In total, she made 28 trades, according to her TikTok and Instagram, where she documented the ambitious endeavor, dubbing it the Trade Me Project.
“I’m trading a bobby pin up until I get a house,” she said in her first video, which was followed by a trade for cheap earrings, then four margarita glasses, a Bissell vacuum cleaner and so on. Skipper, who is a product manager at Cash App, said she used Craigslist, eBay and Facebook to make the trades one at a time.
For instance, she found someone online in need of a carpet cleaning to give her a $95 snowboard in exchange for the vacuum. After that, she traded the snowboard for a $180 Apple TV 4K.
Often, she upgraded after finding out what people were willing to take a loss for. For example, when she found someone desperate for the $320 Xbox she scored, he was willing to part with his MacBook Pro, which cost about $400. When she found a man who wanted her Jordan 1 Reverse Shattered Backboards, she told him she would part with the coveted sneakers for an iPhone 11 Pro Max.
Skipper amassed more than 5 million followers on TikTok documenting her scheme. As her project gained steam, she appeared in a sponsored video for Chipotle, which helped her get even closer to her home. The fast-food company reached out to her about trading her three tractors for a “celebrity card,” which gives the cardholder free burritos for a year plus a catered dinner.
The bigger-ticket items included multiple kinds of cars, a tiny cabin, an electric bike food truck and a trailer equipped with a Tesla Powerwall 2 — the latter of which led to her home in Nashville, Tennessee, on the day after Thanksgiving.
“I can’t believe this,” she said in a video after seeing her house for the first time. “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!”
Skipper told The Post she’s planning to meet with the recipient of her first trade — at her new digs.
“For this first trade, I went to several Facebook groups and posted that I was hoping to find a trade for a single bobby pin until I got a house,” she said. “After many rejections, I finally found Abbie who offered me a pair of earrings she got for her birthday as long as I invited her to the house in the end.”
Skipper added that she and her husband will make the move to Tennessee from California in January — but only temporarily.
“I will be renovating the house and trading the house to someone who really needs it for a bobby pin. From there, I will start again,” she said.
She wasn’t the first to trade her way up to a house. In 2007, entrepreneur Kyle MacDonald traded a giant red paperclip for a two-story home.
