Scrap Wood

Did you know... we rarely throw out any of our wood?  Now, I'm not talking about peed-on shelves or that sort of thing, but the pine boards we buy that get made into houses and toys and all that... possibly little known fact, everything gets used.

When we make the houses, sometimes the boards will snap when we're cutting those circles.  While of course that's not idea, because then we need to re-cut that piece, re-sand it, re-cut the hole, and re-sand all of that... it's not really a problem, because we still use it!

See, the first toy we ever made and sold was the Anything Goes Toy.  It's literally labeled as the toy made with just about anything... as long as it's pine wood pieces!  Sure, some of that is literally cut up to be toy pieces, but a lot of it is simply scrap.  You know, you get a 6' board and start cutting up 11" pieces and 13" pieces and 10" pieces and whatnot, and in the end, maybe you end up with a 2" piece.  I usually have a pile going of scrap wood, and once there's a good amount there, or I've run out of toy pieces to work on, I'll cut that up.

Same goes for wrong cuts.  A few people may remember me talking about when I was making some of the double entry houses... the roofs are 9" x 8".  9" wide and 8" deep.  This needs to be cut down out of larger wood, so I usually take a 10" wide piece of wood and cut it to an 8" length.  Then the 10" side (which is really like 9.5" due to milling) gets cut down to 9".  So, there's multiple cuts on several sides of the same piece of the wood... gotta pay attention to which side you're cutting and which length that side is supposed to be.  So the story of the week, a few weeks back, was when I cut four or so roofs... 8" x 8".  Um... oops?  That's ok though!  I now have a few 8" x 8" shelves available! 

Same with some smaller scrap pieces.  If it's big enough to still be a perch-ish shelf, like where a chin could potentially use it, I may throw some bolts on it and bring it to an expo or use it in one of our used cages.  Too small for that, and it gets further cut down to become a toy part.

If there's a big knot, or something weird about it that I think someone might question whether it's safe or not (it's safe... but understandably, people question everything), I'll keep it here and use it for my chins.  So, either way, it's all getting used.  Just in case you were curious :)