Save the shop.
Keep your life.
You're Ben Baron, and this morning you bought HTX Made — an all-wood furniture shop in Houston — from your old partners for a dollar each. The crew still gets paid, the back bills don't, and there are only two benches.
Back bills, then a finished table.
You know this trade better than anyone in the city, and you still don't have a life to show for it. That's the part the buyout was supposed to fix.
Now every call is yours. Which lead gets your Tuesday. Whether the client hears the honest wood-waste number or the one that wins the job. Whether Wednesday belongs to the bench, or to the blues room on Kirby where a woman named Naomi Adler has strong opinions about Lightnin' Hopkins and no patience for people who just nod.
Real jobs. Real people. Real wood.
Walnut, white oak, pecan, reclaimed longleaf pine. Clients from River Oaks to the Hill Country. Everybody in this shop has a name and an opinion.
The crew
Reuben Castillo, master joiner, allergic to shortcuts. Marisol Vega, runs the CNC, ambitious enough to leave if you ignore her. Dewayne Foster, the finisher, underpaid since before you owned the place — and he knows it.
The jobs
A $14,200 live-edge walnut dining table for the Voss residence. $9,000 of banquettes for a Montrose taquería with a firm opening date. A $19,000 Hill Country lodge order — twelve pieces to one drawing.
The rest of your life
Wednesday jams at the Big Easy on Kirby. Brisket at your mother Miriam's with your twin brothers David and Jonathan and their kids underfoot. Your nephew's bar mitzvah, and whether you turn the yad stand yourself.
Twelve blocks of time. That's the whole week.
Nothing in the shop moves unless you spend a block on it — and that includes you. Four decisions, every week, until the shop either runs itself or runs you.
Which lead gets your charm
A private client, a corporate account, a restaurant against an opening date, or a trade order for volume. Work one and the others keep waiting.
How honestly you price it
Set the wood-waste buffer lean or safe, set your markup, and read the gauge before you send it. Signing costs money too: a 35% deposit lands, then 45% goes straight back out as lumber.
What actually gets a bench
Two benches, three once Marisol runs her own. Wood takes a week or two to arrive, builds take four to six weeks of crew labor, and say yes to everything and the whole shop backs up behind you.
Where the rest of the week goes
The floor, the blues room, your mother's table, or Naomi. Energy is what buys you time blocks, so skipping the second column doesn't win you the first one.
A decision, not a menu.
It plays properly on a phone
Same shop, same numbers, one column. Nothing to install, nothing to sign into — the whole game is one file in a browser tab.
No account. Nothing saved. Nothing to uninstall.
If it isn't for you, close the tab. You're out fifteen minutes and zero dollars.
- Do I need to know woodworking or business?
- No. Every number explains itself as it arrives. If you can weigh a trade-off, you can run this shop.
- Can I fail?
- You can let the back balance grow and run Ben into the ground. It's forgiving about a bad week and honest about a bad month, and nobody is coming to bail you out.
- How long does it take?
- About fifteen minutes to play a few weeks and get the shape of it. The first real decision arrives in the first minute.
- Is it safe for a kid, or a parent?
- Yes. Work, family, and a gentle romance thread. No violence, nothing explicit, no chat with strangers.
- What does it cost?
- Nothing, ever. No sign-up, no account, no app store, no email.
- Sound and motion?
- There's no sound to mute — nothing autoplays. Animation is limited to soft fades, and the page honors your system's reduced-motion setting. It saves nothing and asks for no permissions.
Solid ground.
Clear the back balance. Bank twelve thousand dollars the shop actually earned. That's the week HTX Made stops being something you survive and starts being something you own — the systems running, the crew steady, a Wednesday-night habit nobody has to apologize for.
What you build after that is yours. We're not going to describe it for you.