Please Do Not Saw Up a Complete Set for Craft Projects
Search for craft ideas involving small wooden logs and you find plenty of them: candle holders, name plaques, miniature planters, garlands. Some are pleasant. What most of them do not mention is that a complete construction set is worth considerably more as a construction set, and that cutting one up is a decision you cannot reverse.
Complete sets are rarer than they look
Most second-hand boxes are already short of roof boards, chimneys or the long logs that everything depends on. A full set with its gables and slabs intact is genuinely useful and genuinely harder to find. Turning it into a wreath because it was sitting in a cupboard destroys the one thing that made it valuable to the next child.
Buy craft dowel instead
If the project needs short lengths of round timber, a length of plain dowel from a hardware shop costs very little and cuts to whatever size you want. It has no notches, which most craft projects do not need anyway. Keeping a set from a range such as Lincoln Logs whole and buying two metres of dowel is cheaper than the craft blog implies.
What is fair game
- Genuinely orphaned pieces from a bag