I've been building furniture in a one-car garage since 1985 and selling it at markets, fairs, and consignment shops — over a thousand pieces. Forty of them are in this book, each one with the wood, the cost in dollars, the hours, the cut list, and what folks have actually paid me for it.
Get the Manual — $47 Read the mathMost of what people think of as woodworking skill is really three or four things nobody ever told you, plus doing the boring part properly. The reason it feels out of reach is that there's no money in telling you it isn't.
It's not a conspiracy. Nobody got in a room and agreed to keep it from you. It's just that there's money in selling you a nine-hundred-dollar planer you'll use twice, a set of plans, a class, exotic wood from the other side of the world — and a great deal of money in selling you a bookcase made of glued sawdust that sags in three years so you'll buy another one.
I learned because I had to. In 1985 the orthodontist said my daughter needed twelve hundred dollars of work and we had two hundred. My father-in-law Gene put a hand plane in my hands and said there's twelve hundred dollars sitting in this garage, you just haven't cut it out yet. That summer I built and sold nine pieces. She got her braces in October.
This book is forty of the pieces that came after — the ones that sell, built with a sixty-dollar circular saw in a garage that fits one car, barely. When you build to sell, the market corrects you. Out of a thousand pieces, I've had four come back. Every one of those four is in this book, in the part where I tell you what not to do.
Here's what the store asks for real-wood versions of six pieces from this book, against what the lumber costs where I shop. Go price them yourself — that's the whole point.
And that's only half of it. Every build in this book also tells you what strangers have paid me for that piece — real ranges from forty years of markets, fairs, and consignment shops. Not a promise of income. Just the numbers I got, so you've got something to steer by instead of guessing, which is what I did for my first two years and it cost me.
Each one with the exact boards, the 2026 lumber prices, the cut list, the hours, an illustration, and the range it's sold for — written the way I'd explain it to a neighbor over the fence.
Illustrated ebook · 156 pages · 40 measured cut lists · Instant PDF download · Reads on phone, tablet or computer
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“I'm not promising you a business. I'm handing you forty pieces that sell, with the numbers filled in. What you do with a Saturday is up to you.”
I spent thirty-one years on a factory floor and I've been building furniture in a one-car garage since 1985, because the orthodontist wanted twelve hundred dollars and the plant wasn't going to give it to me. My father-in-law Gene taught me the trade one corrected mistake at a time. It paid for the braces, two used cars, a furnace, and a long string of Christmases where Connie and I didn't have to do arithmetic in the parking lot first. It never replaced the plant — and anybody who tells you a garage and a circular saw will replace your income is selling you something, and it isn't wood.
DALE · BUILDING AND SELLING SINCE 1985 · MICHIGAN
Seven: a circular saw, a jigsaw, a drill, an orbital sander, clamps, a combination square, and a block plane. Under $300 new, half that used. There is no table saw in this book — the first chapter shows you the $8 plywood guide that replaces one for every cut in all forty builds. No planer, no router, no jointer, and I'll tell you plainly not to buy them.
The book assumes nothing. The first chapter — The Garage — covers the tools, how to pick boards off the rack, why wood moves and how that splits furniture, the one glue rule that separates pieces that last from pieces that come back, and the safety rules I've kept all ten fingers with for forty years. Then the builds start at a cutting board and work up. The back of the book has a First Saturday list: three pieces off one trip to the store.
No, and I'll say it plainer than that: anybody who promises you it will is selling you something. I sold furniture on weekends for forty years while working full time. It paid for braces, cars, a furnace, and Christmases. Every build in the book gives you the range strangers have actually paid me — as observed numbers, not projections. What your pieces bring depends on your work, your crowd, and your part of the country.
Power saws take fingers, and I won't pretend otherwise. The book opens with the safety rules and they're not negotiable in it: guards stay on, push sticks always, no gloves at a spinning blade, don't cut tired. Where a piece touches food or goes to a child, the book follows the real standards — cured food-safe finishes, and toy-chest lids built with the safety supports and ventilation the national toy standard requires.
A 156-page illustrated PDF: forty numbered builds, each with a measured drawing, the cut list, the lumber bill, the hours, and the sale range — plus the full section on pricing and selling, Gene's Ten Rules, the First Saturday Cut List, the printable Sales Ledger, and the Sourcing Sheet. It downloads the moment you buy. Free lifetime updates.
It's a PDF. Phone, tablet, computer — and you can print any cut list and tape it to the garage wall, which is what it's for. No app, no account, no subscription.
Then you email me inside 30 days and I give you your money back. No forms, no hard feelings either way.
“There's still money in the things folks forgot how to make.” — Dale