“It’s a little bit surreal,” said the Delta Junction resident, who never expected the overwhelming response.
Obviously, America is ready for what White has to offer, an appealing Web site with free, easy-to-follow plans to build attractive furniture, economically.
White launched Knock Off Wood into cyberspace on Oct. 25, 2009, with her first furniture plan — a king-sized bed — inspired by one she saw featured in a Pottery Barn catalog. Then she waited patiently as web surfers and search engines slowly found her site.
But White didn’t sit idly by. It’s not in her nature. She continued designing and adding plans to the blog which now features 120 furniture plans for multiple uses, all written in a recipe-style form. And her first blog plan, the king-sized bed, continues as the most popular plan to date.
Shortly after New Year’s, White noticed a surge in Knock Off Wood readership. Daily hits mushroomed into the thousands as the blog was discovered and featured in on-line magazine sites and personal and craft blogs around the country and beyond. She now has an international audience. White’s blog has appeared in home magazines in Singapore, South Africa, Australia and Great Britain, and she now is receiving requests to provide furniture plans in metric measures as well.
The attractive blog is topped with a pony-tailed caricature of White and her three-year-old daughter Grace, reflecting White’s computer design expertise. White, 29, earned a degree in computer science at Montana Tech and worked in Silicon Valley in California after college, before returning home to Alaska.
Learning how to build
But it was only after White met and married her husband, Jacob (also a lifelong Alaskan), and they started life together, that the idea for developing and designing stylish furniture began evolving. She credits Jacob for the blog’s genesis, since he is the one who introduced her to basic building skills and was always there to help and support her.
“We were building a house and living in the garage and we had a baby on the way,” she said. “I learned by doing.”
Her husband described her as a quick learner who’s very self-motivated.
“You tell her how to do it once, or she just looks at it, and she knows how to do it,” he said.
But Jacob can’t recall exactly when Ana became infatuated with carpentry and started building furniture.
“I kind of remember when she first went into the shop, and I showed her how to do a few things, and the next time I looked there were quite a few things built,” he said.
One of the impetus’ for building furniture was cost, Ana White said. Whenever she found a piece of furniture she liked in a store or a catalog, it usually was too expensive to buy or ship, and many places wouldn’t ship to Alaska. So she began figuring out how to make her own furniture by studying photos and catalogs. As her house filled up with her do-it-yourself furniture, she started marketing furniture pieces at a local furniture store in Delta Junction.
But building many of the same furniture designs over and over again became boring. White decided to combine her passions for furniture making and writing and start a blog to improve her writing skills.
Passion for furniture
White said she’s obsessed with making furniture and furniture plans. And judging from the photos and stories White has posted on the blog, there are a lot of men and women who share her furniture-building passion. Every morning, she wakes up to several hundred e-mails from grateful readers who have successfully built furniture from her free plans, and many, she says, have made improvements on her designs.
“People are really hungry for the ability to customize their furniture to specific needs,” she said. “Success for me is not my building, but my readers out-building me.”
White is thrilled with the response her free furniture plans have engendered and has a bragging board on her blog featuring her readers finished furniture projects. White thinks some of the enthusiasm for her plans stems from people responding to their recipe-style directions versus traditional, single diagram plans.
Mikk and Toni Mead were so excited at successfully building a bed for their four-year old son, they posted a photo of the finished project and planned to build another for their three-year-old.
“We are so excited to finally be putting some nice things in our home. We have champagne and caviar taste on a beer and hot dog budget. Thanks for making it possible for us to furnish our home without spending an arm and a leg,” they wrote.
Leilani Sand and her husband combined two of the plans available on White’s blog, the Hyde tables and a farmhouse table to fit their home’s needs.
“We used boards that had been shelves in our shed, so they were perfectly weathered and even had some paint that we only partially sanded off. It turned out beautiful. ... Thanks for your blog, I check it every day!”
Another couple, Jen and Eliot (no last name given), wrote they were so inspired after finding White’s website they went right to work on their first project.
“As carpentry virgins, it couldn’t have been easier!” they wrote. “We had looked all over the place for a console table for our upstairs hallway and this one totally fit the bill, at less than a quarter of the cost of the ones we’d liked in stores.”
For the time being, White has no intention of charging for the plans or accepting advertising on the blog.
“People have actually asked me to put a donate button on the site,” she said.
Designing and making her own furniture, she said, has given her the home furnishings she always wanted, and she is happy to share that ability with her blog readers. She now limits her building to designs about which she has hesitations and to wedding and baby gifts for family members and friends.
Women can build too
She firmly believes that women (as well as men) with little or no carpentry skills and standard household tools can successfully follow and build her designs and save 90 percent on the cost of household furniture. According to White, women with sewing and quilting skills have an advantage, since carpentry and sewing skills share some of the same principles.
As for power tools: “They’re just like using a sewing machine, if done properly,” she said, adding, “The tools are just a little louder.”
White suggested that people without power tools ask their local carpentry supply store to cut lumber to size.
Interest in White’s popular do-it-yourself blog has been noticed beyond the Internet. Several television production companies have contacted her, and she recently signed on with a literary agent.
Soon White will embark on another exciting venture — fulfilling her longtime dream of becoming an author and writing a book on the subject she knows best — how to build your own furniture.
Contact staff writer Mary Beth Smetzer at 459-7546.
7,10,11
Congratulations!!!!
iocmn
Nice little blog layout!! Thank you for sharing your plans.