How A TikToker Traded A Bobby Pin Up For Her Dream House
It began with a bobby pin. For the last year and a half, Demi Skipper offered up a single bobby pin for trade on Craigslist. After 28 trades, the 30-year-old TikToker made her final exchange: a solar-powered trailer or a house near Nashville, Tennessee.
It was all part of her “Trade Me Project” on TikTok, which ultimately led to trading her way into a new home. Skipper, who lives in San Francisco, California, documented her entire journey on her TikTok account @Trademeproject, which has since amassed about 5 million followers.
Per Today, Skipper said, “It’s been so surreal. Working towards something every day for more than a year and half, and now I wake up and think, ‘Is this actually real? Is this actually my house?’”
Skipper’s mission was modeled after Kyle MacDonald, who in 2006 traded a red paperclip all the way to a house in a series of fourteen online trades over the course of a year.
During her last exchange before the house, Skipper drew criticism from her followers for trading three tractors for a Chipotle celebrity card. The celebrity card is a rare card, with only a few in existence, given only to celebrities and Chipotle-selected super fans. The card allows one to have Chipotle every day for a year, as well as a catered dinner for 50 people.
Many of her followers deemed it the worst trade she has made — with some noting that it would be unlikely for her to find a potential suitor who wanted the card. As luck would have it, Skipper did find someone. In May, a Canadian woman who Skipper describes as “Chipotle’s biggest fan” emailed the TikToker, saying she wanted to trade an off-the-grid trailer worth about $40,000 for the card, she said. It took about six months to settle some issues to get the trailer over the border, but in early November, she finally made the drive from San Francisco to the U.S.-Canada border to pick it up.
Late last month, Skipper received a message from a house flipper in Tennessee who had been following her journey and was interested in trading a house for the trailer. On the day after Thanksgiving, Skipper finally received the keys to her dream house. In a TikTok video documenting the big reveal, Skipper is seen running up to her brand new house and breaking out in tears in her front yard. “Oh my god,” she says in the video. “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!”
@trademeproject The Final Trade 🥺🏠 #trademeproject #letsgetthishouse
♬ Inspiring and spectacular emotional epics(869013) - Minette
According to Skipper, the response has been “overwhelmingly positive.”
“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.” This upcoming January, Skipper and her husband are planning to move from California to Tennessee to renovate their new home — and go through the entire journey, once again.
“I want to donate the next house I trade to a person who needs it, no mortgage, no rental,” she said. “There’s been a couple of people who have done this once, but no one’s crazy enough to do it twice.”
Watch a video of Skipper talking to her very first trade: a woman from Georgia who traded a pair of earrings she was gifted for her single bobby pin:
