I’m writing this one down so that we can enjoy it for years to come.
It all started where epic tales do: Facebook Marketplace.
First, some background: Jacqueline and I have been sharing a home office since 2021, and it’s worked fairly well. We’ve had a good run, and with her client roster expanding it’s become a problem that both of us can’t hop on a call at the same time.
It’s also, despite what you might have scribbled into your teenage diary, not realistic to sustain a healthy marriage where you literally breathe the same air 20+ hours a day. I love my wife and she loves me. She’d lay down her life for our family, but if she has to hear the same story told on 4 separate 1:1 calls every Monday, she might end up choking me out with an ethernet cable.
That’s two paragraphs to get here: we need a shed. We’ll convert that into outdoor office space for her, and save our marriage while still both working from home doing jobs we love.
Where was I? Oh right: Facebook Marketplace, at the beginning of a journey of Alighierian proportions.
You know how FB marketplace works: it’s a mad-max style, no holds barred, first-come-first served buffet full of “is this still available” and “porch pickups.” So when we found a too-good-to-be-true (I know. We know. We’ll get to that…) shed for sale just an hour(ish) away, we pounced. Jacq hopped in a car to go (with her dad) and check whether it passed a sniff-test, and to beat whoever was “coming tomorrow” by showing up today, cash in hand. (again… I know.)
After all, the way you catch a deal is by acting fast, right? (I get it. In retrospect I can’t believe how many signs we just blew past. Rookie mistakes all around. But stick around. It’s a good story)
Jacq fell in “like” with the little shed in [name of town redacted], and offered half of the $[redacted]purchase price just to hold it. We paid hastily using [payment service redacted] and contacted a towing company to see about getting there over the next few days to move our bargain-priced shed to it’s new home in our yard.
We headed back home, shed keys in hand.
The next day it was rainy, but we went ahead and had the tow truck guy swing by to see what it was going to take to move the shed.
“There’s no shed at the address you gave me”
(Cue that feeling like someone punched me in the gut, and was raring back for a second lick.)
We spent the next few hours piecing together the story: around the time we laid out some cold hard cash (via a handy app), the folks at Westwood Sheds discovered the FB marketplace listing for a shed they had just leased (no money down! no first month’s payment!) to a Ms. Smith (name changed here—but curiously not on the Facebook Maketplace listing—to protect the ongoing legal proceedings) just a few days before.
It (perhaps obviously) violates the terms of your lease with Westwood sheds to… sell the shed, and so Westwood dispatched the truck to go and retrieve the shed.
It’s a good thing we didn’t take it two nights earlier: in addition to being out double the money, we’d be in possession of a stolen shed, and participating in crimes.
Here’s where the story gets extra good.
With the help of the [nearby county] Sheriff’s deputy, we had more than enough to execute a warrant and run through the legal come-to-Jesus portion of the event (still ongoing).
The only thing we didn’t have? A shed.
You know who *did* have a shed? Westwood.
We called up the fine folks at Westwood and asked nicely if there is a “scratch and dent” sale on repossessed sheds. After a few good laughs, and phone-haggling on the price, we had a shed, discounted by a little more than the price we had already given to Ms Smith.
Before she hung up the phone, my wife got that gleam in her eye and I knew a funny line was coming. “So, now that we’ve got a price set for the shed, what will you give me for the key?”
As she signed the last of the paperwork here at the local Westwood branch, the sales guy mentioned that if we refer any friends, we get a $50 check. Again the gleam in Jacqueline’s eye: “Oh, please put down that Ms. Smith referred us. She could use the cash.”
So please come visit us! I’d love to give you the tour of the [Smith] Center for Excellence in Online Commerce. It’s in green:
