“The Plans Were Broken. Not You.” — How a 25-Year Woodworker Solved the One Problem That Ruins Most DIY Projects

If you’ve ever bought a woodworking plan that looked professional but fell apart the moment you tried to build it, this will feel uncomfortably familiar.

A typical home workshop project. With the right plans, anyone can build high-quality furniture from scratch.

You already know what you want to build. You can picture it — the deck out back, the dining table the family actually gathers around, the workbench that finally gets the garage under control.

But every time you sit down to really start, something gets in the way. And after talking to hundreds of weekend woodworkers, we found it’s almost never the thing they blame themselves for.

The frustration everybody quietly assumes is their fault

Here’s how it usually goes. You find a plan that looks great — nice layout, decent photos. You buy the lumber, clear your Saturday, and get started. Then around step four or five, things go sideways:

• A measurement that doesn’t match the diagram.
• A step that jumps from “cut the side panels” to “attach the face frame” with nothing in between.
• A materials list that’s off by just enough to send you back to the lumber yard.
• $60 of lumber quietly turning into an expensive mistake.

And every time, the same thought creeps in: “Am I doing something wrong?”

You’re not. The plan just isn’t finished. It looks complete — but it isn’t.

That’s the conclusion Ted McGrath came to after 25 years of teaching hands-on workshop classes. According to Ted, the number one reason people quit woodworking isn’t talent and it isn’t tools. It’s plans that look professional but skip the hard parts — no assembly order, no hardware specs, measurements that are close but not close enough.

The bad plan that started everything

Ted traces it back to 1989 and a white oak cabinet. He was teaching a Saturday workshop — eight people, all skill levels — building from a plan pulled out of a popular woodworking magazine. Professional layout. The kind of thing you’d trust.

By step six, three people were stuck. The dado measurements assumed nominal lumber dimensions instead of the actual milled size you get at the store. One student had already cut his side panels wrong — not because he couldn’t measure, but because the plan was wrong.

That night Ted took the plan home, threw it out, and rebuilt the cabinet from scratch — measuring every joint as he went and writing down every cut as he made it. He handed the rewritten version out in his next class. Nobody got stuck.

One plan became 16,000

Over the next 25 years that one rewritten plan turned into a library. Ted says he eventually hired a full-time team of twelve who do nothing but design, build, test, and publish plans — roughly five new plans a week, fifty weeks a year, for over two decades. On top of that, hundreds of former workshop students act as real-world testers. The rule: if a weekend hobbyist with a basic table saw can’t follow it, the plan isn’t done.

The result is called TedsWoodworking — a fully searchable, filterable library of over 16,000 plans, each one built and tested in the shop before it reaches you. Every plan comes with step-by-step instructions, exact cut lists, complete materials lists, and multi-angle schematics with exploded views of every joint.

What actually makes it different

• They’re finished, not drafts. Every plan is physically built in the shop first, so confusing steps get rewritten and measurements get verified to 1/16″ — before you ever see it.
• Exact cut & materials lists down to the last screw, so you buy what you need and stop making three trips to the hardware store.
• Find a plan in minutes. Search by keyword, filter by 100+ categories, sort by difficulty — not a chaotic zip file full of PDFs.
• Built for the shop you already have. Most projects need a table saw, a drill, clamps and a sander — no $5,000 tool list.
• New plans every month, free, for life. No recurring fees, plus you can request a custom plan for a project you can’t find.

The interactive TedsWoodworking members dashboard where you can search, view, and download 16,000+ plans.

What members say

The honest part about the price

Ted is upfront that the standard membership is moving to $39/month, because a twelve-person team supporting 54,000+ lifetime members can only draft so many custom plans. For now, though, you can still lock in lifetime access for a one-time $67 — same library, same monthly releases, same custom requests, no recurring fees. Once capacity fills, the one-time option goes away and $39/month becomes the only way in.

Common questions

You already know what you want to build. The only thing standing between you and that finished project is a plan that actually works. For a one-time $67, you never have to search for one again.