When Facebook Marketplace Changes Your Shop Overnight

So, I set a goal this year to write one article a month, and for the first part of the year I was doing pretty decent.

Then life happened.

The last couple of months have been pretty busy, and somewhere along the way the blog fell off the priority list. But I'm back, and I figured there was no better way to get started again than writing about a pretty major score I just had.

As someone running a relatively young, one-man woodworking business, I started with mostly "hobby-level" tools and have slowly built my shop piece by piece. Most purchases have been based on what made sense at the time, what I needed for a project, and—probably most importantly—what I could afford.

And honestly, that approach has worked pretty well.

I've built up a pretty stacked shop full of perfectly good tools that get the job done. Sure, there are times when my table saw feels a little underpowered or my benchtop jointer suddenly feels very small, but I've always figured out a way to make it work.

I've even learned when it makes more sense to lean on other local businesses instead of trying to force my equipment to do something it wasn't designed to do.

For example, I've had several projects involving countertops that were simply too large for my equipment. Instead of turning down the work, I found a local cabinet shop with industrial equipment. I throw the guys in the shop some money, give them a couple of days, and they handle some of the jointing and planing for me.

Problem solved.

But as the business has grown and the size and number of projects have increased, I've started realizing that I need some "new" equipment.

And by new, I don't necessarily mean brand new.

I mean equipment that can handle larger projects and, just as importantly, make me more productive.

While I build plenty of custom pieces, I also have several products that I make repeatedly for businesses and sell through my website. When you're making one item, taking an extra five or ten minutes on a step isn't a huge deal.

When you're making 10, 20, or 30 of them, those minutes start adding up.

For production work, I need tools that help me work faster and give me accurate, repeatable results every time.

So I've had a few major upgrades on my radar:

• A cabinet saw to replace my contractor saw

• Better dust collection

• A drum sander

Each one would solve a different problem in the shop, save me time, and improve repeatability.

There's just one small issue.

Professional woodworking equipment isn't cheap.

The Grant That Didn't Happen

Earlier this year, I stumbled across an organization offering grants specifically to small woodworking businesses.

Obviously, that got my attention.

Part of the application required explaining what I would do with the money if selected, so I basically put together my shop wish list and explained how those tools could help me grow the business.

Then I hoped and prayed.

Unfortunately, I wasn't one of the businesses selected.

I'll be honest: that one stung.

I had already started imagining what those upgrades would do for the shop, and when it didn't happen, it made me question how I was going to take both the business and my passion for woodworking to the next level.

Apparently, the answer was Facebook Marketplace.

Enter the Rabbit Hole

A friend of mine sends me Facebook Marketplace listings all the time.

I always look.

And, like everyone else, I inevitably get sucked down the rabbit hole.

Usually, I don't pull the trigger because the prices aren't in my budget. I've also always been a little apprehensive about buying large used tools.

You don't really know what condition they're in.

You don't know how they've been maintained.

And let's face it—you can meet some interesting characters buying things from strangers on the internet.

Then one morning, after having an especially crappy morning at work, I decided I needed a five-minute mental escape.

So I opened Facebook Marketplace.

The second listing I saw said something along the lines of "Shop for Sale."

And sitting there in the photos was a drum sander.

The listing had been posted less than an hour earlier.

Now, I don't spend a ton of time on Facebook, but I knew enough to know something like this probably wasn't going to sit around long.

So I immediately messaged the seller.

She sent me her phone number and told me to call her.

I know, I know.

Sharing phone numbers with random strangers from the internet isn't exactly Rule No. 1 of internet safety.

But at this point I was committed.

The first thing I asked was:

"Are you selling everything individually, or are you looking to sell the whole shop?"

Her answer was basically, "Whatever."

She started rattling off a few of the things she remembered seeing in the shop, and it became pretty clear that she didn't really know exactly what was in there.

That made things even more interesting.

We agreed to meet that evening, and I immediately called my friend and told him he was coming with me.

The Holy Gates Open

The seller showed up about 45 minutes late.

Naturally, this set off every alarm bell in my head.

But she eventually arrived, unlocked the building, opened the doors...

...and the Holy Gates opened.

This wasn't someone selling a couple of old woodworking tools.

It was a full-blown woodworking shop.

Large machines.

Small tools.

Jigs.

Lumber.

Hardware.

Accessories.

Drawers full of bits, blades, screws, sandpaper, and things we hadn't even identified yet.

A lot of the equipment was older—some of it probably around 20 years old—and several pieces definitely needed some TLC. If you follow me on Instagram, you may have already seen some of the clips of me cleaning rust and years of grime off cast-iron tops.

But this wasn't cheap equipment.

These were professional-grade machines. They all had their accessories and original owner's manuals

As we continued going through everything, we also started learning a little more about where all of it had come from.

The shop had belonged to the seller's father, who had passed away just a few weeks earlier. Before getting sick, he had run his own cabinet business, which suddenly explained a lot about what we were looking at.

These weren't just random tools someone had collected over the years. This had been a working shop, built by someone who had spent years using these machines to make a living doing the same kind of work I love doing.

It also added a different perspective to the whole purchase.

For us, we were excited about finding an incredible collection of tools.

For her, she was clearing out her father's shop.

That wasn't lost on me.

The deeper my friend and I dug through everything, the more we realized we had stumbled onto a little gold mine.

Buying one or two machines didn't make sense anymore.

We needed to buy the whole thing.

Time to Negotiate

I offered $3,000 for everything.

Was that low?

Absolutely.

But it was already more than the total of what she had listed on Facebook.

She countered at $4,500.

And that's when I had to stop for a second.

Because here's the reality:

$3,000 wasn't really in my budget.

$4,500 definitely wasn't in my budget.

But standing in front of me was essentially an entire woodworking shop.

So after a little internal soul-searching—and probably some questionable financial reasoning—I came back at $3,700.

She accepted.

For $3,700, we were buying all of the tools, accessories, hardware, and lumber in the shop.

Here's just a small sample of what was included:

• 15" planer

• Jet cabinet saw

• Powermatic jointer

• Husky 60-gallon air compressor

• Jet 2 HP dust collector with chip separator

• Jet 14" bandsaw

• Porter-Cable 3¼ HP router and router table

• Multiple sheets of oak veneer plywood

• Jet lathe

• Drill press

• Nail guns

• Router bits

• Drill bits

• Blades

• Clamps

• Hand tools

• Hardware

• Sandpaper

• Lumber

And honestly, that list doesn't even come close to covering everything.

There were drawers and cabinets full of stuff.

Now What Do I Do With All of This?

My friend and I decided to split the purchase.

We paid half that evening, loaded some of the larger machines onto my trailer, and scheduled another day to come back for everything else.

A week later, we returned, loaded the rest of the shop, paid the remaining balance, and thanked the seller.

My friend kept four or five of the tools for his shop that I didn't need.

I took basically everything else home.

And that's when I encountered a new problem:

My shop was now completely overflowing with tools.

There were machines everywhere.

Some were obvious upgrades.

Some duplicated tools I already owned.

Some I wasn't even sure I needed.

And there were several pieces where I honestly didn't know whether the tool I already owned was better than the professional machine I had just bought.

So I did the only logical thing.

I took pictures of everything.

Every machine.

Every model number.

Not just the equipment I had bought, either—I photographed the tools I already owned too.

Then I dumped the entire story, the tool lists, and all of the photos into ChatGPT and basically said:

Help me figure out what the heck I just bought.

One by one, we started comparing machines.

What should I keep?

What should I sell?

Which machine is actually an upgrade?

What's each one worth?

Which tools are redundant?

Which ones could change how I work?

Slowly, the pile of random machinery started turning into an actual plan.

Some tools are staying.

Some are already listed for sale.

Some are replacing machines I've used for years.

And some—like the lathe—are opening the door to parts of woodworking I've never really explored before.

The funniest part is that several of the items on my original "someday" upgrade list were sitting in that shop.

A cabinet saw.

Much better dust collection.

A larger planer.

A jointer that isn't sitting on top of a workbench.

And the drum sander that made me click the listing in the first place.

Sometimes the Opportunity Just Looks Different

I'm still sorting through everything, cleaning machines, reorganizing the shop, selling duplicate tools, and figuring out exactly what this purchase means for Henry Hardwood Workshop.

But there's something about the whole experience that has stuck with me.

A few months earlier, I had applied for a grant because I thought that was how I was going to take the next step.

I didn't get it.

At the time, that felt like a door closing.

Then one random morning, after a lousy start to the day, I opened Facebook Marketplace to waste five minutes and stumbled across an opportunity I couldn't have planned for.

I definitely wouldn't recommend spending thousands of dollars every time you're having a bad day at work.

That's probably not a sustainable business strategy.

But I do think there's a lesson here.

Building a small business rarely happens exactly the way you picture it.

Sometimes growth comes from saving money for the next machine.

Sometimes it comes from borrowing time on somebody else's equipment.

Sometimes it comes from slowly upgrading one tool at a time.

And every once in a while, somebody opens the doors to an old woodworking shop and your entire plan changes overnight.

But there's one other part of this whole experience that I've thought about quite a bit.

These tools already had a life before they ended up in my shop.

They belonged to another woodworker—a man who ran his own cabinet business and spent years using them to build things for other people.

I never got the chance to meet him.

But I can only hope that somewhere he's looking down and smiling, knowing that many of his tools didn't end up forgotten in a storage building or scattered across a dozen Marketplace listings.

They're back in a shop.

They're being cleaned up, put back to work, and used by another small business owner trying to build something of his own.

And maybe there's something pretty cool about that.

I've still got a lot of cleaning, selling, moving, wiring, and reorganizing ahead of me.

But for the first time in a while, I'm looking around my shop and seeing less of what I can't do and a whole lot more of what's possible—with a little help from the generation of craftsmen who came before me.

Not bad for a five-minute Facebook Marketplace break.