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Showerthought: I hit 500 board feet of reclaimed lumber before I even realized it
I was cleaning out my workshop last weekend and decided to stack all the reclaimed wood I've pulled from jobsites over the last 6 months. I kept a rough tally in my head but never actually counted. Turns out I had 511 board feet of oak, pine, and cedar all piled up in the corner. That's like $1,500 worth of lumber if I bought it new from the yard. What surprised me most is how it just happened without me trying. I started grabbing it just to save a few bucks on a small shed project. But now I'm thinking about building a whole dining table set with some of it. Any other builders here track how much reclaimed material they've collected by accident?
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rowan22mo ago
lol yeah I started doing the same thing a couple years ago for some shelves and now I'm basically a hoarder with good intentions. my pile is probably around 300 bf but its mostly random lengths of 2x4 and some really beat up oak flooring I pulled from a remodel. the funny thing is every time I see a dumpster on a jobsite I gotta check it now like some kind of raccoon.
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grace_knight701mo agoMost Upvoted
Totally feel you on the dumpster thing. I walked past a construction site last week just hoping they'd thrown out something good, and my husband was like "please don't." I've got a pile of old baseboard that's probably too beat up to ever use but I just can't chuck it, you know? And the 2x4 thing is so real everyone has like forty warped ones that might be straight enough for some random project someday. At least we're saving stuff from the landfill, thats my excuse.
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the_xena2mo ago
Calling yourself a raccoon is pretty accurate, I started checking curbsides on trash day like they were my personal lumber lottery.
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