About Weekend Wood Shop

The first thing I ever built was a bookshelf that leaned. Not a little. It had a visible list to the left that got worse depending on which shelf you loaded. My wife called it "the Pisa bookshelf." I called it done. That was March 2020, the first week of a lockdown that wasn't supposed to last long, and I have been in the garage building things ever since.

I'm Brian — IT project manager, suburban Minneapolis, half a two-car garage now converted into a woodworking shop. I've built cutting boards, a coat rack, a workbench that I actually trust, and a white oak dining table that took twelve weekends and one very cold Minnesota January to finish. My wife lets guests eat off that table. The Pisa bookshelf is in the basement, still leaning.

Weekend Wood Shop is how I review the plans and tools that made the difference between projects that came out right and ones that taught me something expensive. I build from the plan before I write about it. I note the time estimates (usually wrong), the skill assumptions (usually optimistic), and the moments where the instructions left me staring at the piece trying to figure out what step three actually meant. If a plan is well-written and produces what it promises, I say so. If it's a mess of ambiguous line drawings that wasted a Saturday, I say that too.

Not a carpenter. Not a professional woodworker. I manage software sprints for a living and build furniture on weekends. The crossover is more useful than it sounds — both involve debugging things that look fine on paper until you try to execute them. Who I am in more detail: author page.

Some links on this site earn me 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.