Make Your Own: Gourd Birdhouse

Before we launch into this project, I want to invite you to click over to My Mod Style and see the group guest post I contributed to today! Jessie matched us up with  Disney characters! So fun and super cute.

Okay- What a fun project this was!! I'd been seeing these cute gourd birdhouses at the farmer's market for weeks and really wanted one. A few weeks ago I saw that one booth was selling just the gourds, so I bought one for $4 with the intention of making my own.

Such an easy project for an afternoon. I had Andy help me with drilling the holes. First he drilled the hole for the opening. You don't have to have this fancy attachment. There are other ways to do it, but this was just a quicker option and since I'm impatient, I went for it.

He also drilled two holes at the top so I could thread some string through it to hang it from.

And don't forget to drill a small hole in the bottom for drainage, just in case your birdhouse gets water in it.

You'll need to clean out the inards of the gourd. I used a long handled wire brush to get it all out.

Then take some sand paper to it and sand it until it's smooth and you've gotten all the dirt and debry off of it.

At this point you may want to soak it in some bleach water just to get it real clean. I didn't feel that my gourd needed it so I skipped that step. I went right on to painting it. It's suggested that you paint it a light color so it won't become a 'bird sauna' in the summer. I chose a happy yellow- mostly because that's what I had on hand.

My original plan was to put two coats of paint on it. After the first coat, I decided that I really liked the look, so I left it.

I used the back end of a paint brush to dot this little heart design near the doorway to my birdhouse.

I used a large needle to thread some twine through the top to hang the birdhouse from.

Your last step is to hang it!

I absolutely love how it turned out! I may have to make a second one next year. We'll see if it actually attracts any birds. If not, that's okay, because it's cute anyway.