A TikToker traded her way from a bobby pin to a tiny house in 6 months. Here's exactly how she did it step-by-step.

During quarantine in her home of San Francisco, Demi Skipper was watching YouTube videos when she stumbled upon a Ted Talk about a man who traded a red paper clip all the way up to a house.

It was about 15 years ago, Skipper found through further research, and she hadn't seen anyone do it since.

"I have to be the second person to do this," Skipper said in a recent interview with Insider. "Given all the time we have in quarantine, I thought it was the perfect opportunity to try."

Skipper made two rules for her trade journey. The first was no accepting money.

"It just seemed like it wasn't fair," she said.

The second was that she couldn't trade with anyone she knew. No friends or even friends of friends.

"That also felt like it was too easy," she said. "So it had to be somebody I had never met. I felt like Facebook was a great place to start."

Her first few trades were done in person around San Francisco. Later trades were made through shipping and road trips across states.

Skipper provided all of the following trade values based on what similar items were selling for elsewhere, like Facebook Marketplace.

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Skipper joined several Facebook groups for random interests, like "garage sale San Francisco" and "women of San Francisco." Skipper then started posting about trading for a single bobby pin — her starting item.

"I will accept anything," she told Facebook users.

After many rejections and no replies, one woman in Atlanta, Georgia, said she'd trade a pair of earrings for the pin.

"She had gotten them for her birthday last year and never worn them," Skipper said. "She was planning on donating them or throwing them away."

The woman with the earrings told Skipper to be sure to invite her to the house once she gets it.

"I thought, 'this is perfect. She believes in me,'" Skipper said.

Before she gained a significant following, Skipper's main trade strategy was to look for things of similar value on Facebook Marketplace and offer a trade instead of money.

"In the beginning, it was pretty easy because the values were so small," Skipper said. "So a lot of people just have random things playing around their house that they're willing to trade away."

She reached out to hundreds of people on Facebook for trades, and the platform has mistaken her for a bot many times.

"I think it's a compliment that I'm working so quickly that I get blocked by Facebook. It's happened probably 50 times," she said.

But each time she gets blocked, it's for 48 hours, delaying her from trading.

"These were all pretty easy to do," Skipper said of the first few trades. "It was a small enough of value that I was trading almost once a week and sometimes two times in a week."

"It must have been 10 to 15 years old, and it was just sitting in someone's garage," Skipper said.

"Getting a name-brand electronic felt great," Skipper said. "Nearly anybody would want it."

The Apple TV was a turning point for Skipper. Having a widely desired product allowed her to trade up faster.

"It was the oldest MacBook I had ever seen," she said. "It worked but it was really heavy."

She had to ship the laptop to the trader.

"You really have to put your trust in people," she said of the online trade.

She worried she could send this Macbook to this random person, never get anything in return, and have to start over.

But the camera did come, and Skipper went forward with her journey.

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Skipper said she didn't know anything about sneaker value, but the person she traded with walked her through how to tell if a pair of brand-name sneakers is real.

"We became friends, and he became my sneaker advisor for the next few trades," she said. "It's been cool making friends that I never ever would have met otherwise."

"People who were interested in sneakers are obviously sneaker collectors," she said. "But it was nerve-racking and time-consuming. I did a ton of research for every pair."

"The iPhone 12 hadn't come out yet, which was great. It was the nicest iPhone at the time," she said.

When a family offered to trade their car for the iPhone and drive it to San Francisco, Skipper's first thought was "this is a scam. There is no way that there's somebody willing to drive cross country to meet me."

But after a bunch of research and FaceTime calls with the family, she found that they were serious.

"This was the first time that people were really interested in the journey itself rather than the trade specifically," she said.

"The car was in great condition," she said. "I think the cross country trip from Minnesota all the way to San Francisco was just the last straw."

With little knowledge of how cars work, Skipper thought this was the end of her journey.

"I remember sitting in the minivan just by myself, on my laptop for four hours looking for anybody that would take this van," she said.

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"I played it off like the boosted board was a good trade at the time because I just needed to keep going," she said.

"It was much newer than my first one," Skipper said of the laptop. "It was a really good trade for me."

"This was definitely the weirdest trade," Skipper said.

The guy with the bike cart turned out to be an employee for the company who builds the product.

After some negotiating with the employee and his boss, Skipper was invited to tour their factory in Los Angeles and make the trade.

"My husband and I drove down to LA with the MacBook in-hand and got a tour of the whole factory," she said. "Then we rode the bike all over San Francisco."

For the bike food cart trade, Skipper had to find a unique person who would be interested in such a niche item.

"I really needed to hone in on a person that would be interested in it as opposed to just reaching out to anyone," she said.

She found someone in North Carolina who was interested in starting an ice cream cart company on the beach. He traded a Mini Cooper convertible that had just been sitting in his garage.

Skipper shipped the bike to North Carolina and had someone who had been following her journey on Tik Tok park the convertible in their garage for two weeks while she looked for the next trade.

Since her run-in with the van, Skipper says she's learned a lot more about cars and feels more confident now with those types of trades.

"The issue with cars is that you're also managing the titles of the car and the registration," she said. "That's a whole lot of work, but I've gotten very knowledgeable about cars and different titles and how to make sure they're registered correctly to the next person."

A woman with a diamond necklace in Virginia reached out for a trade. Skipper picked out a jeweler in her town and had it appraised. It was worth $20,000, they said, so Skipper accepted the trade.

Three women who were following Skipper's journey on TikTok volunteered to drive the car from North Carolina to Virginia.

When she received the necklace in the mail, Skipper decided to get it appraised again, just in case.

But this jeweler said it was only worth around $2,000, and Skipper started crying.

"It sounds ridiculous because it's just a trade, but it's so many hours of my life. So much time and energy," she said.

So she took a couple of days off from searching for trades.

"I had to reset and think about why I'm doing this," she said. "If this was easy, everybody would be trading up to their dream house."

This was a great trade for Skipper because Peloton bikes were sold out at the time, she said.

A woman in Seattle really wanted a Peloton stationary bike, and stores were sold out. So she traded Skipper for a 2006 Ford Mustang. Skipper mailed the bike to Seattle and her friend held onto the car until she was able to make another trade.

Skipper found a woman with a 2011 Jeep Patriot who said that a Ford Mustang was her dream car.

"For me, it was a better trade because it was a much newer car, but for her, she had always dreamed about a Mustang," Skipper said. "She didn't really care what year it was."

The Jeep was in Pennsylvania, and Skipper found another volunteer who had been following her journey to hold onto it until the next trade.

Skipper found someone with a tiny cabin in the same Pennsylvania town that the car was located and offered a trade.

"I negotiated for eight days because this tiny cabin owner was really unsure about the jeep," Skipper said.

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The woman who was holding onto the Jeep, Shannon, reached out to Skipper to see how the trade was going, and Skipper let her know that she was struggling to seal the deal with a tiny cabin owner.

"Oh, I know someone with a tiny cabin — is his name Austin?" The woman asked Skipper.

His name was Austin.

In fact, Shannon and Austin were childhood friends. This fortunate coincidence led Shannon to vouch for and facilitate Skipper's trade for the tiny home.

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Although it's been a long, emotional journey for Skipper, it's not over yet.

Skipper intends to keep trading her way up to her dream house, and she sees this tiny home as a tiny milestone.