Are you tired of looking at desks that you have to pay a fortune for? Are you tired of reading blog posts that tell you how to build your own desks but offer absolutely no plans? Are you just looking for a few good plans that you can start building today without spending any money or buying any tools? If you found yourself answering ‘yes’ a lot recently, please read on! This will be the ultimate guide to finding free farmhouse desk woodworking plans 🙂
Internet Based Plans
Let’s kick off this epic woodworking plan search with the internet search, as usual. The internet is a wide open space with millions of new articles being added every day (including this one!). However, if you are a regular to this site, you will know already how hard it can be at times finding free woodworking plans. That’s the whole reason I make these posts, I do the research so you don’t have to!
Our first stop on this whistlestop tour is a site called HouseGrail. They popped up with a listicle of ’19 FREE DIY FARMHOUSE DESK PLANS YOU CAN MAKE TODAY’. Don’t know why they feel the need to shout with their title, though. As far as listicles go, this one is actually pretty good. They have at least made the effort to put nice featured images in the post and most of the plans linked to are still active. I can’t tell you how many dead links to woodworking plans I have clicked over the years!
That was a pretty good start, right! The next plan I unearthed was from Handmade Haven, who had a quality post on how they made their farmhouse desk. There was a step-by-step guide with plans incorporated into this. The only issue is that some of the plans were rather small, and you have to pay just over $5 to get the printable plans. Not exactly free anymore is it 🙂 To be fair, the blog post instructions would be good enough for a lot of woodworkers, but more so experienced ones.
Ana White popped up next in my search, someone that seems to generally be a great source of free woodworking plans (as she has featured in my searches a few times before). As with the last post, this one is more like a blog post mated with a woodworking plan. You get the plan images and the step-by-step instructions and blog commentary all rolled into one post. This does form an excellent set of instructions for anyone wanting to make a farmhouse desk (she calls it a rustic desk), but to the purists this is still not a woodworking plan 🙂
It would seem that these types of blog cross woodworking plan posts are all the rage. I had to skip past a few more (that weren’t any better than what was mentioned above) in order to get to my final destination for internet based plans 🙂
Thankfully, Heather Studios has come up trumps with some actual free proper downloadable plans for a wooden farmhouse desk (they have a blog post about it too if you need it). The only downside here is you need to handover your email address to get the free plan. If you want a free plan, I think this is a small price to pay personally. If you don’t like the emails they start sending you, it’s simple to unsubscribe these days. No worries.
I have to say that the internet search went pretty well, although it would have been ideal to have slightly more actual physical woodworking plans, but you can’t have it all when your budget is zero 🙂
YouTube Based Plans
Now on with the YouTube search. As with the internet based plans, it was tricky to find a video that came with a decent accompanying physical plan. Although the next best thing was this video by the ‘Build it Better’ channel, where the guy literally walks you through everything to do in order to get an awesome looking farmhouse desk. If you are a visual learner, this will be perfect for you. Other than the video, there is a list of materials (along with wood measurements), but other than that no physical woodworking plan is present.
Bentley Design Co. is the channel up next, and they have come up with a decent instructional video showing how the farmhouse desk was made (along with some really bad singing!!). The downside is that this not only doesn’t come with any kind of physical plan; it doesn’t even include a cut list or material list of any kind. I appreciate the effort they went to for the video, but it feels incomplete if they expect others to build this project for themselves. Apparently, this desk was heavily inspired by the Handmade Haven desk above, so in theory you could combine that post with this video 🙂
Finally, I found a more vlog style video by Nic Gutierrez. If you prefer a instructional video with text labels and trippy music, this may be the build video for you. Not the most detailed regarding the projects materials and cut list, but you can at least follow the process through from start to finish. I chose this one, as it at least shows a different style of farmhouse desk to the others on offer. I found most of them looked the same or followed very similar styling. This one stands out as being a bit different.
To be honest, you should probably watch all of the videos and decide for yourself which style you prefer, or if you are an experienced woodworker maybe you can make your own hybrid version inspired by these videos.
Yet again, this post has highlighted the difficulty of getting actual high quality physical woodworking plans for free. You are often left with more vague walkthrough instructions than a plan. This is why I personally like to buy a pack of plans, so that I don’t have to spend hours sat at my computer doing research. I simply look through the plans, choose one I like, and get right to it. More time woodworking and less time messing around. If you want to take a look at the pack of plans I currently recommend, you can check out their official website HERE.