I made my first real DIY build in 2020, when lockdown turned my spare room into an office with a wobbly old desk that was about to fall apart. So, I found some build plans for a 2×4 desk — I hid every screw, because exposed hardware drives me up the wall. Before that, I’d never built a piece of furniture. Finishing it told me I could take on more than I’d assumed.
Four budget Ryobi ONE+ tools did the heavy lifting, all bought on the cheap and half-expected to wear out fast. Instead, they became some of the most useful tools I own, and on that first build, they saved me a few hundred dollars over a comparable solid-wood desk. Choosing the cheap tools and building it myself is where the savings came from.
Circular saw
The first cut that made the build possible
First, the 2x4s had to be cut to length, and that fell to my Ryobi ONE+ circular saw. I didn’t have a chop saw or a table saw back then, or really any of the usual shop gear. So I’d mark a line, clamp my speed square next to it as a fence, and run the saw along that edge to keep the cut square. That was plenty for someone who’d never cut framing lumber before. No extension cord snaking across the garage, no gas, and no setup beyond charging a pack.
The saw runs about $40 as a bare tool and lands around $89 in a kit with a battery. Premium cordless saws cost two to three times that, and for a first project, I had no business spending the difference. I needed clean, repeatable cuts in cheap lumber, and that’s exactly what I got. My first few cuts came out crooked. A few boards in, that stopped happening. By the third or fourth leg, I’d found a rhythm, and the cuts came out straight.
Color
Yellow
Tool Type
Circular Saw
Drill
Hidden pocket holes, thanks to a Kreg jig
The reason you can’t spot a single screw in that desk comes down to the drill and a Kreg jig. The jig—about $40—clamps onto your workpiece and guides the bit in at a steep angle, boring an angled “pocket” that hides the screw once it’s driven. My Ryobi drill did all that boring. It also drilled the pilot holes that kept the 2×4 ends from splitting when I joined them, which happens more than you’d like with construction lumber. I bought the drill in a two-tool combo alongside the impact driver, the cheapest way to land both at once. The set ran somewhere around $99–$149 and threw in two batteries and a charger that still powers half my collection today. The drill itself isn’t glamorous. It bores holes and drives the occasional screw. But on a build where I wanted clean joinery, it and that little jig did most of the quiet work.
Impact driver
Tight joints with no stripped screws
Driving the screws is the step where the desk either held together or didn’t, and the Ryobi impact driver is what got it right. Each leg joined the apron with a pair of pocket screws, and more tied the rest of the frame together. The impact driver set every one flush and snug—no stripped heads, no screws left sticking up, and nothing I had to back out and redo.
In soft pine, that’s easy to get wrong. It mattered more than I expected for how the desk actually felt. One sloppy joint is the difference between a desk that shifts when you lean on it and one that sits dead solid. Mine sits dead solid, six years on. It’s still the first thing I reach for when two boards need to become one, which describes most of what I build now.
Sander
From splintery 2×4 to smooth desktop
Construction-grade 2x4s come rough. Run your hand down a fresh one, and you’ll catch the mill marks, the stamped ink, and the occasional splinter waiting to find your palm. A desk made from boards in that state would look and feel like exactly what it was: a stack of cheap lumber.
My Ryobi random orbit sander is what closed that gap. I worked up through the grits—coarse to knock down the roughness, finer to smooth it out—until the top felt like something I’d actually want to rest my forearms on for eight hours. I rounded the hard edges so they wouldn’t dig in, and erased the printing and scuffs before staining. The sander runs about $40–$60 as a bare tool. It’s the least I spent on any tool for this desk, and it’s the one that did the most for how the finished piece looked. Half an hour of sanding is cheap insurance against a desk that looks thrown together.
Still using that desk
I worked at that desk for years before I outgrew it. When I finally swapped in a bigger L-shaped one, getting rid of it never crossed my mind. It was built too well to toss. My son inherited it, and it’s holding up in his room just fine. It cost less than a store-bought desk would have, and it’s done everything I ever asked of it and then some. The low price wasn’t a compromise—it’s what let me start at all. I won’t pretend every Ryobi tool is a winner; a couple I’ve bought since were duds, and I’ll happily tell you which to skip.
But these four launched a habit, and eventually a whole workshop built on the same batteries. Start cheap, build something, and the skills outlast the receipt.
