You start a project and you have a pretty good idea what you will need to finish it. If you’re one of those people who likes to plan ahead, you probably have all of your material lined up and ready to go. If you’re more like me, you hope that maybe you have enough material lying around and start without checking.
At any rate, making cuts always results in the piece you need and the piece you may or may not want. You need sixty inches of 1×4 pine so you cut that from an eight-foot piece. It leaves you with a two-foot piece of wood. You look at it lovingly and set it aside because it’s useful.

Or at least that’s what I do.

I always think whatever is left over is useful. And I must say, quite often it is actually used for something. Sometimes, I only need a 26-inch piece of 1×4 pine and there it is … somewhere in my workshop.
I am starting to be somewhat overwhelmed by all the seemingly useful offcuts. They are difficult to organize. The plastic tub I originally used for storing them is full. The shelf I set up to store more of them is full. And the floor next to the tablesaw is starting to stack up with them.
One of the problems is the fact that you can’t see what you have. I thought having them sticking up out of a plastic tub would make them more visible so I could see if I have a 1×2 piece of maple 16 inches long, for example. What I’ve actually discovered, however, is that having a container with pointy sticks protruding from it is a bit dangerous. I keep picturing myself tripping and becoming impaled. So, I have that well out of the way. And everyone knows what out of the way equals. It’s the same as not having it.
So that is full and unused. I don’t know what’s in it, anymore – except for about 50 pieces of fir strapping that was leftover from a job several years ago.

The other organization method, namely the shelf, suffers from the fact that wood is not normally transparent. I can only ever see what is on top and that looks so comfortable, I just don’t want to bother to look under it. I reasonably expect that the more useless things will move to the bottom of the pile, with every subsequent sorting through to pick out something useful. Well, that might be true if I ever did anything more than just add to the pile.
My method of hoping I have enough material to do a project is what I always hope will eat into the offcuts. I think I’ll start off by digging through what I already have and picking out the more useful pieces. I think of this as a kind of delusional optimism, because I almost never follow through on it. I almost always end up getting new material.

And the piles of leftovers let me down, anyway. A few days ago, I had to make two cabinet doors. I figured out the way I wanted them to be, wrote out my measurements, settled on the details, then searched for some appropriate wood. Amazingly enough, I found a few pieces of pine that were almost exactly right for it. So I set up to make my cuts to width. Then I cut the pieces to length. Then I set up the dado to cut the grooves for the panel. Before I made my first cut, however, I realized that I had cut some pieces too short by not accounting for the tenons I would need in each end. They were 19 inches instead of 20 (I wanted a half-inch tenon to fit in the dado I would cut for the panel).
I took a look around. I knew there had to be some pine there somewhere. I searched all the likely places (floor, shelves, on and under the workbench). I was starting to get frustrated and began more strenuously cursing myself for making such a thoughtless mistake. Luckily, however, I found a piece wide enough and long enough to get what I needed. Since the saw was set up with the dado blade, I decided I would cut the piece to length before making the cuts to width. I carried the wood to the chop saw where there was already a stop block set up. I thought, “This is handy,” and immediately made the cuts, resulting in two pieces 19 inches long.

The sound of the motor was still audible although quickly drowned out by the sound of me slapping my forehead and cursing myself more than before for repeating exactly the same mistake.
I wanted to immediately burn the wood.

What’s the moral of the story? Well, I spent so much time looking through all my garbage offcut wood that I forgot why I was doing it in the first place. And I’m starting to think it would all make a fine fire in my back yard.

I never did find another piece of pine that was long enough.