Offcuts

I do some woodworking now and then – or, more accurately, wood butchery. Sometimes when I do a project like this:

I end up with a lot of these:

Offcuts. Pieces of wood which seem too small to do anything useful, but too big to throw away. If you do only one project a year, even if you plan carefully, you’ll end up with enough offcuts to sink a battleship. You can use some of them as building blocks for the kids or grandkids, of course, but what then? Doorstops? A kid only needs so many building blocks, and a household only needs a handful of doorstops. No, sometimes it’s nice to have some variety.

Here’s one thing I made with them: a colorful abstract art mirror, which coordinates nicely with the Miros and so forth in my house. (Someone please stop me before I extend that thought to its sad conclusion and say that I like the Miros because they match my couch.)

For this project, I used a Malma mirror from Ikea as a base, then glued on small painted offcuts. These particular mirrors have a pretty wide frame, which undoubtedly makes them popular with the gluing-stuff-on-other-stuff crafting contingent. They also cost a pittance. ($3 as of this writing.) With a little acrylic paint and some wood glue, one is good to go. This particular project might also be fun with unpainted wood. Either way, it’s a good afternoon project for kids as well as adults.

Here’s another thing I made, a bench for the garden:

It isn’t the sort of large, generous bench which invites lolling about with a book and a cold drink, but it adds a bit of whimsy and makes a nice place to perch. All it took was some threaded rod, which I hacksawed to length, and a handful of nuts and washers. Drill holes through all of the blocks, thread them on the rod, and voila – a rickety bench!

If I ever do this project again, I may make the bench deeper or shape and paint the wood blocks to look like stacks of books. Long carriage bolts would have made nice improvement over the threaded rod, as well. If you use rod, you have to be careful to countersink the holes in the top board so the end of the rod won’t poke somebody:

Unfortunately, these projects didn’t make much of a dent in my collection of offcuts. Guess I’ll have to think of some more projects.

4 Responses to “Offcuts”

  1. Judy Warner says:

    Great idea. And thanks for pointing out those mirrors. I will have to think about that for an idea I had.

  2. Virtually every time I do a project, I also do one of those post-mortems about what I’d do differentlynext time. Same with cooking, now that I think about it.

  3. admin says:

    Hi Judy! I’ll be looking forward to seeing what you create.

  4. admin says:

    Hi SAW!

    Yeah, I think half the fun of doing a project is thinking about things which went well and not-so-well, as well as project variations. I wonder if that’s a sign that one is process-oriented?