Bird Houses & Feeders
Bird Houses & Feeders
Crafted from recycled license plates
Bird Houses & Feeders
A few years ago, I was looking to try my hand at a new project. I've always enjoyed building birdhouses; I can remember as a kid building one with my Dad in the garage and hanging it in the pine trees in the backyard. While my son, Jack, was in Cub Scouts, we built a couple birdhouses with his pack, and Jack and I also built a couple more just for fun. All the birdhouses of years past were all constructed out of scrap wood, and for a new project I felt I needed to kick it up a notch. Move over wood, here comes the license plates! Lots and lots of license plates!!
I found some inexpensive license plates online and ordered them up. After some measuring, figuring, and experimenting, I was able to lock in a design, which is very similar to how I craft them today. After a couple of trial and error runs, I ended up buying more plates. Then my wife suggested I get an Etsy shop online as an outlet to sell the craft of my newfound hobby. I had NO idea what that would lead to. I sold a birdhouse, took the profit and invested in more license plates. That happened a few more times as the birdhouses slowly left the workshop. Eventually, I upgraded my tools to help ease my production quality and time. Now I'm fully set up to craft birdhouses and do so on a regular basis. I've locked in some go-to vendors to get my license plates from and even have a designated corner set up in the basement to do license plate crafts.
Any birdhouse that is built and ready to ship is currently listed on my Etsy shop. Custom orders are accepted, but because of the supply and demand on some plates/states, a custom price may need to be set. It's kind of crazy how some plates sell for so much more than others, but I do my absolute best to keep my prices down when I'm looking for a plate to fulfill a custom order. If you have license plates that you want me to use, that's no problem and will save you money on the build; contact me for more info.
Most license plates are made from aluminum, however, there a couple of states who still use galvanized steel for theirs. Aluminum won't ever rust and the steel will resist rust for quite some time because of the galvanization. I fasten the birdhouses only with aluminum rivets so that the fasteners do not rust out, or poke the birds with a sharp point like a screw would. Typically, I don't put a perch on my birdhouses and people often wonder why. It's because smaller birds are very agile and don't really use the perch because they can manage to just fly directly through the hole of the face of the house. The entry hole on the birdhouses get filed down, and I made sure that there's no sharp edges or barbs by dragging my finger around the inside of the hole, however I strongly suggest that you do not ever try this yourself! My technique is just to make sure that the bird isn't going to get cut while using the point of egress, not to keep someone else's fingers from getting cut.
Whether your going to hang a birdhouse in the backyard for your feathered friends to enjoy, or just display inside the house for some unique décor, these birdhouses will have a long life and are a definite conversation piece.
