If you have some free time on your hands, or have some projects around the house that you want to complete, you may be thinking about taking up carpentry. It’s a great hobby, and it’s one you can enjoy even if you don’t have any previous experience. The fact is, wood project plans aren’t hard to find online, with many sites offering detailed plans that include step-by-step guides and lists of the items you’ll need. But how can you go from never having worked with wood to making it your hobby? Here is the three step process.

1. Get the basics

Before you delve into woodworking plan research, we recommend getting the basics down. Make sure you have decent measuring tools like tape measures, carpenter’s pencils, combination squares, and more. You’ll also want to get the tools you’ll need for cutting wood, such as jigsaws, hand-held circular saws, and hand-held backsaws. You just need to get one of each, and you don’t need to get the expensive power tools. You can do it yourself, no need for power saws.

2. Understand how wood joinery works

In addition to learning how you are going to cut the wood and reshape it, you also need to understand how the pieces of wood are put together. That will help you as you develop simple and complex projects. Start with a glued or screwed butt joint, as that is one of the most basic ways you would join the pieces of wood together. You can also experiment with things like glued joints to see how they can be useful.

3. Find a Top Site for Woodworking Plans

There is no doubt that you can become a woodworking hobbyist on your own, but it is very helpful to use sites where you can browse and identify woodworking plans. These sites will show you different wooden objects and then show you how they are made. There will be visual and written guides, and you’ll see a list of the items you’ll need.

Going with woodworking plans is a helpful start, because it will eliminate beginner mistakes. When you are just starting out with woodworking, going with a guide is very helpful. You are just following steps, like completing any task. You don’t have to think on the fly or adjust based on how something turns out. You’re just going through the steps and you’ll end up with something that looks amazingly like the product shown on the site.

Don’t think that woodworking is a hobby that you will find too difficult. We promise that as long as you take it easy and don’t try to create an overly complex structure as your first project, you’ll have a lot of fun. You’ll start to understand how you can manipulate wood with different saws, and then you’ll see how those pieces you’re cutting can be joined together.