Brian Lindgren
I run Weekend Wood Shop from suburban Minneapolis, where I live with my wife and half a two-car garage that slowly became a woodworking shop over the last four years. The other half still has the car. The car is fine. The workshop is better.
Day job: IT project manager. I spend my weeks running software sprints, writing risk registers, and explaining to stakeholders why "it depends" is a complete answer. Then on Saturdays I go out to the garage, make cuts I should have measured twice, and learn something the hard way. The two jobs have more in common than I expected — both involve documentation that looks clear until someone actually tries to follow it, and both involve a lot of moments where you stare at what you built and wonder if the spec was wrong or you were.
I started woodworking in March 2020 with a $30 board from Home Depot and a plan to build a bookshelf over a long weekend. The bookshelf took three weeks, used twice as much wood as planned, and had a structural lean that my wife documented in a photo she still texts me occasionally. Since then: a workbench (the first one collapsed; the second one held a 200-pound miter saw without complaint), a coat rack that involved three more attempts than any coat rack should, a white oak dining table that came out right on the twelfth weekend, and a cutting board collection that happened because cutting boards are the woodworking equivalent of a quick win after a frustrating project.
How I review plans
Every plan I write about here I've built from. Not assembled from someone else's build-along — actually built, in my shop, with the tools a non-professional weekend woodworker owns. I note what the time estimates in the plan assumed versus what it actually took. I flag where the instructions were ambiguous enough that I had to stop and re-read three times. I write down what skill level the plan actually requires versus what the cover page claims. Minnesota winters test heated-garage assumptions that plans from warmer states quietly bake in.
If something doesn't meet my workshop standards — skill level overstated, materials list wrong, instructions that would cause a beginner to waste an afternoon — that's in the review. Nothing here gets rounded up to a positive mention because someone sponsored it. I don't accept review copies of anything that would require me to say something I wouldn't say otherwise.
Posts by Brian Lindgren
- Building a DIY Woodworking Clamp Rack for a Small Garage Shop
- Building a DIY Small Greenhouse for Your Suburban Backyard Garden
- How to Install a DIY French Cleat Wall for Garage Tool Storage
- Build a DIY Cordless Drill Charging Station for Your Two Car Garage
- How to Build a DIY L-Shaped Desk for a Small Home Office
- Building a Mobile Tool Cart for a Small Two Car Garage
- Building a DIY Adirondack Chair: How I Used Professional Furniture Plans to Upgrade My Patio
- How to Build a DIY Miter Saw Station for a Small Garage Workshop
- From Cubicle to Coop: Building a Suburban Chicken House That Neighbors Won’t Hate
- Dust Collection on a Budget: How an IT Guy Keeps the Garage Clean
- The 4-Hour Gift: 5 Quick Woodworking Projects Using Only Scrap Wood
- The Suburban Homestead: Why I Built My Own Raised Garden Beds This Spring
- Agile Woodworking: Applying IT Project Management to My Garage Workflow
- Stop Buying Plastic Totes: Build This Cedar Storage Shed Instead
- How I Finally Built a Sturdy Workbench Using Professional Garage Shop Plans
- Debugging My Joinery: 5 Common Woodworking Mistakes and How I Patched Them
- The Minnesota Winter Survival Guide for Unheated Garage Woodshops
- Why I Risked My Marriage (and Fingers) on a DIY 8x12 Shed: My Shed Plans Review
- TedsWoodworking Review: Is the 16,000 Plan Library Actually Useable in 2026?
- The 12-Weekend Dining Table: How a Minneapolis Garage Project Survived a Cold Winter and My Own Mistakes
- Beyond the Lopsided Bookshelf: The Walnut Cutting Board That Saved My Woodworking Ego
- Garage Workshop Economics: How I Built a Functional Shop Without Liquidating My 401(k)
- Why My First DIY Bookshelf Was a Total System Failure (And How Real Plans Saved My Garage)
Disclosure
Some links here earn me a small commission when you buy through them, at no extra cost to you. I write about plans and tools because I used them — not because someone sent them or paid for placement. The ones that wasted my Saturday are documented as ones that wasted my Saturday.