Cute Birdhouse Town – DIY

There is nothing I love better than spending time with my boys and creating a little something fun for the holidays. To start with, I must say that I had a completely different picture in my head of how this project would go, but couldn’t be any happier with the way it turned out.  For a while my boys have been wanting to paint something.  They are very like their mother.  While shopping at our local JoAnn’s, I came across a few things to make this happen.

I bought 3 birdhouses – one of which was on a stand, some little chicks, some burlap flowers, and paint.

My boys were thrilled when presented with the opportunity to paint, however, not so much with the colors I chose but we went with it.  I did want to keep Easter in mind.

Yes, I realized that we are in fact in our pjs and our hair is messy, but sometimes that is our best  time to get to work.  Plus it’s spring break and so to show you how real we are we went with it!

I love the look on my oldest’s face and my little guys is concentrating very hard!

They had a ton of fun and really got into it.  It was a very happy Mom moment.  I love seeing what they came up with and love the little creative looks they get when they are working.

After I left JoAnn’s, it dawned on me that only one of  the bird houses was on a stand and that it was going to be a war of who got that one, so we made a pit stop to Target and went through the dollar bin section looking for something that would work when my oldest came across this…

Perfect!  I had some cardboard tags at home that I knew would work for the base so we grabbed the pinwheels and went home.

For the 2 bird houses that didn’t have stands, I just flipped over and drilled holes in the middle and same for the base.  I made sure the drill bit for the hole was just a tad bigger than the width of the pinwheel stand so that I wouldn’t have to glue the pieces together.  It was a close fit but worked well.

Here’s the finished product, complete with the boys styling their birds how they wanted them.  The bird houses are in their bedroom and puts a smile on my face everytime I see it.  They are so excited and I can hear them tell their birds good night before they go to bed, true bliss!  I love the creativity that they used while painting and putting their birdhouses together.  It was looking a little bare so we decided to add another project to go with this one.

We went for a drive the other day up in the hills in our town.  On quite a few of the hills/mountains there are tons of the “really BIG windmills” as my littles says, and he finds them so fascinating as they are GINORMOUS.  I thought, why not make some to add to our little Chick town?

For the other part of this project we made some pinwheels using various scrap book paper we had lying around, wooden dowels and colored brads.

I cut 3 squares down to 6 x 6.  Since I don’t have a paper cutter, I used one of my old sewing mats, my ruler and a rotary tool I use just for paper.  Yes, I’m crazy but I make it work.

I drew out my lines and measured down an ½ inch on both sides and cut up to there.  I punched a hole in each of the corners and used a needle to make my mark in the middle.  Then I folded up each corner and put the brad in the middle to hold it together.

I cut various sizes of the wooden dowel and attached with hot glue.

Here it is all together!  I bought the little bucket from Target for a dollar.    We love the cute birdhouse town my boys made for their chicks to live in.

Happy Spring  & Easter!!!!