Stuff that you busted your back making or creating is closer to you than that which you bought with money that you earned doing the same. Unfortunately, wood is one of items that a certain cross section of people treat as one of god's creations, and left unattended, is still in the public domain for gathering. This unwritten law extends even farther into other categories of goods that are "discovered". An example is, I was a contractor in the liquidation of an old closed grocery store, which we had dismantled about 1/2 of when a smaller contractor was hired by the landlord to secure some electrical boxes inside for his future use. While taking apart a shelving run backed up against a freezer case aisle, we found about 400 bars of soap that had fallen over the top and down in between the shelving run and the freezer case. The next morning, a little over 1/3 of those bars were gone, and I found them in the back of the electrical jobber's truck. He got incredibly stubborn and wouldn't give them back, and challenged the ownership of them in the first place. Some people believe that their proximity to unprotected goods is sufficient to lay claim. And there is a gray area as far as the law is concerned, where ownership is a matter of interpretation by the civil courts. If you cannot show a breaking and entering, or some document proving ownership, you're pretty much out of options as far as criminal justice goes.
