Your tools are on the floor, on the bench, in a bin you dig through every time you need the drill. A French cleat wall fixes that, but it looks like a weekend of math you'd rather not get wrong.
Guess, and you're back at the store for the sheet you were one strip short on, or you screw a rail into drywall and watch a loaded shelf pry itself off the wall.
Type your wall and you get the cut list: how many rails and at what heights, how many 45° rips, how many sheets, where every stud and screw lands. Here's a 10-foot wall behind a workbench under an 8-foot ceiling: eleven rails, eight 45° rips, one sheet for the rails, 176 screws, every one in a stud.
Nothing you type here leaves your device. No account, no server, no analytics. Your numbers live in this browser tab and are erased when you close it. "Start over" wipes them now.
About 90% of my garage hangs on a French cleat. It's the reason I never had to buy a shed. Three years ago I turned an office nook into one; this fall that same wall became the backpack hub. My first hangers kept falling off, worst with shelf brackets, until I added a stop. And when I asked an AI to draw me a cleat, it drew it backwards and forgot the other half. Once you get the 45 down, you can do a whole garage in a weekend. This does the math for that weekend.
The garage: 5-minute tour on YouTube, short cut on Instagram and Facebook. The office nook, now the backpack hub: Instagram, Facebook.
A block on the bottom of each hanger, as thick as the cleat, bears on the wall below so weight pushes in instead of prying out.
I'm a physical therapist, and I spaced my wall like a workstation. Hand tools go in front of the bench, waist high and up, inside a normal reach, on rails 6 inches apart. Everything else gets 12. The top rail is above easy reach on purpose: long things hang from it and you grab them low.
Inches. Only the width is required; the rest is filled in with the spacing I use on my own wall.
Rails sit 12 apart below the bench and above 9 feet, 6 apart in between. 18 is my first rail. Type your own bench top.
Find the first stud with a finder or a nail. Center, from the left end.
Most problems are who-you-know. Name one person who'd hang this wall with you. It's a good third thing: do it side by side and you'll talk for two hours without trying.
Now make the call — ask: “got a Saturday? I'll buy lunch.”
Washington or Dakota County, Minnesota. Off-market, or straight from the owner — I'm the buyer, not a middleman passing it along. Woodbury, Cottage Grove, Hastings, Stillwater, Eagan, Inver Grove Heights, Lakeville.
If that's you, or you know somebody quietly thinking about selling, I'll lay out your options — all of them, including the ones I don't make a dime on. Nothing to sign, no walkthrough unless you ask.
That was free and nothing here sits behind an email. If it was useful, here's the whole exchange: send it to one or two people who'd use it too. That's it. I'm trusting you with it, you pass it on.
Want the next one before anyone else? I'm building an interest list — no selling, no sequence, your address goes nowhere. Exactly what that means, in plain words.
The list itself isn't open yet — I'm still setting it up, and I'd rather say that than put up a box that doesn't work. The ask above stands either way, and it's the one that matters. If you want to tell me what to build next, my DMs are open.
Free. This tool asks you for nothing — no gate, no email, no analytics. When your wall is up, DM me a picture.