DIY recipes in Animal Crossing: New Horizons give you access to build new items that can be used around your island, or in your home, but if you’ve been playing Animal Crossing New Horizons for some time, you may start to collect duplicate DIY recipes and be wondering what to do with them.
When you first are starting out in Animal Crossing: New Horizons, duplicate DIY recipes won’t be too much of an issue, while you might get one or two duplicates, it won’t be enough to cause you much bother, but once you’ve progressed through the game and collected a lot of recipes, duplicates can start to become a real issue.

If you try and learn a DIY recipe that you already know, you’ll soon realize you can’t do much with it. The only things you can really do with your extra Animal Crossing DIY recipes are:
Animal Crossing New Horizons spare recipes can take up valuable inventory space. Why? Because you can’t store them in your house! That leads us to the question, what do you do with them?
1. Give Them To Someone Else
If you have friends on Animal Crossing New Horizons you could see if they don’t have your duplicate recipes and give them to someone else.
This is one of the most effective methods to already learned recipe cards. You can choose to sell them if you want to make some money, or simply give them away.
Places like Reddit have communities full of people up for trading.
2. Sell DIY Recipes To Nook’s Cranny
Selling DIY recipes to Timmy and Tommy at Nook’s Cranny is a fast and easy way to get rid of your duplicate DIY recipes.
However, you won’t make a lot of money selling the DIYs at Nook’s Cranny, so if you’re in for a profit, don’t expect much.
3. Drop DIYs On Your Island
One of my personal favorite methods of getting rid of already learned DIY recipes in Animal Crossing New Horizons is to drop them on your island.
Thanks to wonderful creators like Bumps on Pinterest, there are some really inspiring ways to drop your DIY recipes.

Head on over to the Able Sisters shop on your island and access the Custom Designs app. Enter either of the following to get the custom design above:
- Design ID: MO-6LCM-R5BL-M4QM
- Creator ID: MA-9043-9466-1379
This will allow you to save a custom design in your custom designs app. Once you’ve saved the designs you like, go to your nearest DIY workbench and do the following:
- Create a Stall (you can purchase the Stall recipe ID from the Nook Miles counter in Resident Services)
- You’ll need 12 Wood per stall
- Go to your DIY workbench and select “Customize something”
- Navigate to the pencil sign on the screen and choose your custom design
You can then place your Stall down on your Island and “Drop Item” on your unwanted DIY recipes to place them on and near the stand. Cool right?
4. Trade Them for Turnip Sales
One of the best ways to make money in Animal Crossing is to sell turnips, but doing so can be a long-winded task as you will need to wait for the best turnip sale prices.
There are plenty of people on Reddit and other platforms advertising access to their islands when they have the best turnip prices. Many people tend to leave these players’ money or DIY recipes as a thank you for letting them sell turnips on their island.
This way everyone wins, the person hosting the island with good turnip prices has a chance of learning some new recipes while the other player gets to make some extra money thanks to the inflated turnip prices.
If you would rather keep hold of your duplicate DIY recipes you can simply store them in your home by pressing right on your D-Pad when inside your house. Or, if you have a storage shed, you can store them from there too.
Some people also make dedicated DIY storage areas on their islands, so any guests who visit can take a look and see if they need these recipes.
You can trade almost anything in Animal Crossing: New Horizons, simply drop the DIY recipes on the floor and another player is able to pick them up and keep them. They can even take them back home to their own island.
If you have unlocked the garbage can recipe in ACNH, you can put your duplicate DIY recipes in the trash, which will completely destroy them.