About Weekend Wood Shop

Weekend Wood Shop covers woodworking plans and tools for people who build on a weekend schedule in a home shop. Most plan reviews online come from instructors or full-time woodworkers: their shops are larger, their tool inventories deeper, and what reads as "beginner-friendly" to them can mean three trips to the lumber yard and a wasted Saturday for everyone else. This site tries to close that gap.

The site is run by Brian Lindgren, an IT project manager in Brooklyn Park, Minnesota who has spent six years building furniture in a half-converted attached garage. Not a professional woodworker, not someone with formal training. Someone who has built enough projects to know which plans are honest about their skill assumptions and which ones quietly expect you to already know what they are not explaining.

Coverage is limited to indoor furniture and workshop builds: cutting boards, shelving, workbenches, chairs, tables. Outdoor structures and anything requiring permits, footings, or construction-grade structural knowledge are outside the site's scope. For indoor furniture builds in a cold-weather home shop, six years of garage projects generate opinions worth sharing. For deck framing or pergola footings, you want someone else.

The editorial standard: every plan reviewed here is built before it is reviewed, in a real hobbyist shop, with the tools a weekend woodworker actually owns. Tools are used across multiple projects over at least a month before anything gets published. If a plan wastes a Saturday, the review says so. More about Brian: author page.

Some links on this site earn a commission when you buy through them, at no extra cost to you. I only link to plans and tools I've actually used in my own workshop. Full details in the privacy policy.