NEW YORK — Ana White, who runs a popular website devoted to woodworking for women, came out with her first book this fall. The cover of "The Handbuilt Home" showcases a huge hammer and a fair amount of pink. Inside, close-up shots of well-crafted, brightly painted sideboards, console tables and play kitchens look like they were taken from a Pottery Barn catalog, only White includes instructions on how to build them yourself.

There are photos of smiling young women who've used White's carpentry plans, alongside their testimonials ("This great console table really is a simple project") and tips ("It helps to use a shelving jig from a woodworking store").

White isn't the first to target an increasingly visible demographic of women who want to build their own furniture, but she's one of the savviest. Her website,, is an amalgam of the ideals of American womanhood, blending a pioneer woman's can-do spirit with the intimate tone of a mommy blogger. White, once a self-described Alaska "housewife" and stay-at-home mom, says she was "afraid" of power tools until a turning point in 2007. She and her husband were broke, sleeping on a mattress on the floor, and she realized that the only way they'd ever afford a well-made bed was if she made one herself.


Five-foot-four and size 2, , White was also juggling the demands of a newborn baby when she designed and built that farmhouse bed. If I can do it, her message to other women goes, of course you can.

"I'm not a trained carpenter; I'm just a mom," White, 32, told me over the phone from Delta Junction, Alaska, which is so remote — seven hours from a Target — that she had almost no choice but to embrace the DIY ethos for almost everything, from the paper banner for her daughter's birthday party to a tiny picnic table for her American Girl doll. "After I built my first piece of furniture, I realized it doesn't take an incredible amount of skill with the tools we have available today. It just takes a really good plan and someone telling you, 'Yes, you can do this.'"

White's message of power-tool-empowerment is echoed by a number of other women's carpentry blogs, some of which have winking names like Pink Toes and Power Tools and Pretty Handy Girl. Home Depot's free Do-it-Herself workshops are couched in the language of Weight-Watcherian validation, inviting you to come build "an interior two-tiered wreath chandelier" while building "confidence" in a "female-friendly environment."

Putting aside the irritating assumption that grown women will purchase power tools only in a color associated with toddler girls, the trend speaks to an economic reality. Single women made up 19 percent of all first-time home buyers in 2012, compared to 11 percent of single men. If women are buying their own houses, they're also fixing them up. Their growing willingness to repair a loose stair, or for that matter, build a custom coffee table, represents the latest in a long line of traditionally male areas colonized (and in many cases, dominated) by women, including professional sports and lucrative fields like medicine, pharmacy and the law.

I became interested in White's website, ironically, because of my husband. He's one of her rare male readers — 89 percent of White's Web visitors are women — and built a beautiful picnic table for our deck using one of White's free designs. When he bought her book as a kind of thank-you for that design, I started reading her. White's website, which mixes her own designs with a blog about her life and a bragboard featuring work by readers, is geared toward carpenters of all levels. In her section called "tips for newbies," she posts large pictures of tools with explanations of exactly how to use them.

Lately the DIY movement seems to be flattening gender roles. Men have gotten into artisanal mayonnaise-making and lampshade-crafting, and, according to The New York Times, Martha Stewart has become for a certain set of male hipster what Streisand is to the gays. Women, meanwhile, have wandered into the realm of sawdust motes. Once you buy a circular saw, you can no longer be considered merely "crafty."

Which is good, because why is using a power drill considered so much more complicated than, say, refinishing a table? A drill is, as White puts it, really just "a handmixer with a different bit on the end." The physicality of working with wood may be one reason it's taken women awhile to come around to it, even though you don't actually need great upper-body strength to hold a drill, or to feed a 1 X 8 plank of pine into a wood saw.




I said yes.