Ana White Woodworking Plan Scraper

Scrapes free woodworking plan metadata from Ana White — the most-searched free-plan brand on the web. Extracts structured data from 3,000+ DIY furniture and project plans including title, difficulty, shopping list, cut list, tools, category, room, author, and publication date.

What the data looks like

Each result contains:

• plan_id — Drupal node ID (unique plan identifier)
• title — Plan title (e.g. "2x4 Outdoor Sofa")
• slug — URL slug for the plan
• category — Project type (e.g. "Sofa, Outdoor Seating", "Storage Woodworking Plans")
• room — Target room/space (e.g. "Outdoor", "Bedroom", "Kitchen")
• difficulty — Skill level (Beginner, Intermediate, Advanced)
• materials_list — Shopping list as an array of strings (e.g. "11 - 2x4x10' boards")
• cut_list — Cut dimensions as an array of strings (e.g. "9 - 2x4 @ 72" long")
• tools_required — List of required tools (e.g. "Miter Saw", "Kreg Jig")
• author — Plan author (Ana White in most cases)
• published_at — Publication date (ISO 8601)
• thumbnail_url — Plan thumbnail image URL
• plan_url — Canonical URL of the plan page

Use cases

• Lumber estimators — import materials and cut lists for cost calculations
• Project planning apps — browse plans by difficulty, category, or room
• AI woodworking assistants — structured training data with real materials and tools
• Portfolio / inspiration tools — curate and display plans by type
• Affiliate product matchers — match tool/material lists to product databases

Scope and coverage

Ana White hosts 3,000+ free woodworking plans across all skill levels and room types. This actor crawls the paginated project index (no sitemap) and follows each plan's detail page. Plans span furniture, outdoor, storage, beginner, and advanced projects.

Only plan metadata is collected — PDF plan files are not downloaded (copyright). All data extracted is publicly accessible without login.

How to use

Set Max Items to control how many plans to scrape. The default is 10 for a quick preview. Run without a limit to collect the full catalog.

Input	Description	Default
maxItems	Number of plans to scrape	10

Sample output

{
  "plan_id": "36036",
  "title": "2x4 Outdoor Sofa",
  "slug": "2x4-outdoor-sofa",
  "category": "Sofa, Outdoor Seating, Lounging and Accents",
  "room": "Outdoor",
  "difficulty": "Beginner Projects",
  "materials_list": [
    "11 - 2x4x10' or 104-5/8\" (prefer red-toned 2x boards)",
    "3 - Deep Seat Cushions, 24\" x 24\" x 4-5\" deep, with matching pillows",
    "150 - 2-1/2\" to 3\" long, self-tapping exterior decking screws"
  ],
  "cut_list": [
    "9 - 2x4 @ 72\" (or cushion width x times 3)",
    "13 - 2x4 @ 25-1/2\" (or cushion depth plus 1-1/2\")",
    "2 - 2x4 @ 28-1/2\" (or cushion depth plus 4-1/2\")"
  ],
  "tools_required": [
    "Tape Measure",
    "Speed Square",
    "Pencil",
    "Drill",
    "Miter Saw"
  ],
  "author": "Ana White",
  "published_at": "2019-03-16T13:11:56-0700",
  "thumbnail_url": "https://www.ana-white.com/sites/default/files/styles/node_teaser_thumbnail/public/...",
  "plan_url": "https://www.ana-white.com/woodworking-projects/2x4-outdoor-sofa"
}

Notes

• The site has no robots.txt crawl-delay restriction for woodworking plan pages. The actor paces requests conservatively at 5 concurrent requests.
• Materials and cut lists are extracted from the site's HTML Shopping List and Cut List fields (not the downloadable PDF plans).
• Tool names are extracted from affiliate-linked images on each plan page (using image alt text).