[buescher]

Pare parts stock down to a minimum. You are going to have to order parts for nontrivial projects anyway. Keep the leftover parts from a project in the labeled Mylar bags they came in, in one of the cardboard shipping boxes. Label the box with the name of the project if you won’t remember what’s in it. Throw them out after a while.

I have a couple of drawer boxes with a resistor assortment and some other parts. I really should consolidate them down to one. Maybe none - I don’t do much (i.e. any) tinkering or through-hole rough prototyping anymore. You need very few actual resistor values in each decade for typical tinkering and straightforward design. I could probably live with 1.0, 1.50, 2.21, 3.31, 4.64, and 6.81; and not even all of those in every decade. Other values, if for example you’re designing a filter or something, order them as needed.

For typical microcontroller and similar digital stuff you will want to have a stock of 10K resistors and 0.1 uF capacitors.

Don’t stock electrolytics if your time has value - they have a shelf life of about ten years Spools of wire I keep in shoebox-sized plastic boxes from Rubbermaid or Sterilite.

Ridiculously cheap Arduino doodads I keep in the compartment boxes they came in.

Harbor freight has a lot of things like plastic drawer boxes and compartment boxes for good prices.

A good label maker is nice to have, or you can print on Avery label sheets.