So you’ve just finished installing your brand new hardwood floors and you find yourself left with some extra planks. Or perhaps after cutting a number of planks to different lengths, you’ve built up a pile of oddly shaped pieces all at different lengths. No matter what the situation, it is common with many homeowners to find themselves with extra wood, discarded wood, or both after completing work on their new hardwood floors. Before you start pulling your hair out over what you should do with all that extra hardwood, you should stop and consider one of these creative do-it-yourself projects that can be done entirely with wood!

Make a Wooden Cabinet Door

Unused hardwood planks can be used to craft a beautiful wooden cabinet door of almost any size. All you need to do is make sure the planks’ tongues are cut off and then use them for the door’s stiles and rails and plywood or glass for the panel. Arrange the leftover boards with the grooved sides facing inwards in order to capture the panel, and then secure them with screws or glue. It’s a great way to liven up your cabinets with a little twist of style.

Frame a Photo

Why not use a small amount of that leftover or discarded hardwood to make a cute and stylish picture frame? This is a great idea for anyone looking to get a little more arts and crafty with their extra wood. You can either use one type of wood for a solid frame, or two types (if you have two types left over) for a multi-colored frame. Either way, your next memory is going to be even better captured and displayed with a stylish, hand-made frame.

Build a Coffee Table

This one is obvious. A nice coffee table is the perfect DIY project using leftover and discarded hardwood. Wooden coffee tables are currently trending and are not going anywhere anytime soon, so it’s time you got in on the action! You’ll want to cut off the grooves on your planks and fit them together with scrap wood braces. You might also need to stain any planks that do not match the colour of whichever wood you’ve built the bulk of the table out of.

Create a Multi-colored Floor in another Room

If you have a high number of different colored wood scraps leftover after one or more hardwood floor projects, you’ll want to consider jumbling them all together to create an entirely new wood floor in another room. Depending on how much wood pieces you have left over, you can try to cover the floor in a small or medium-sized room with them. It may not sound great on paper, but the end result can be a mixture of different wood planks that create a medley of color that is more than pleasing to the eye.

Create a Wooden Ceiling

If you have enough leftover or discarded hardwood planks of considerable length, you can use them to cover an existing ceiling. Lightweight pre-finished engineered wood planks are your best bet here; use construction adhesive to place them perpendicular to ceiling joists and nail the tongue of each plank to a joist too.

These are just five of the many uses you can explore for discarded and leftover hardwood. Hopefully the next time you end up with lots of leftovers after a hardwood project, you’ll have a little more inspiration as to what to do with them!