About Grainwright

Grainwright 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.

Most of what gets built and reviewed here lives indoors: cutting boards, shelving, workbenches, chairs, tables. Every so often a simple backyard piece sneaks in, the kind you can finish in a weekend with the same tools and no permit office involved. What I stay away from is anything that needs footings, engineered spans, or an inspector's sign-off; for builds like that you want someone with construction credentials, not an IT guy with a miter saw.

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.