Castle Birdhouse for 5 Families

This is a super easy project, made with leftover materials and other free stuff laying around in the wood pile. If you finish this properly with sanding, staining, and polyurethane, you will have a really cool birdhouse.

Supplies

1x6 board leftover pieces (the dog ear fence picket from lowes,) paint sticks, old wooden baseball bat, dollar store chain, soda can, metal straight pieces from a broken umbrella,

polyurathane semi-gloss, teak oil, golden oak stain, some deck screws 1 5/8 #6, title-bond waterproof glue,

you can do the whole thing with hand tools, but I used a radial arm saw, cordless drill, some hand tools, and a band saw because I have them.

Step 1: Make a Plan, a Few Fancy Cuts for Main Base.

This build is about as easy as it gets. You can do the whole thing in a weekend, the most amount of time is just waiting for glue to dry. the bottom front box is a little funky but the pics show how to do it. Look carefully as to what sides are on the inside and what are on the outside. #6 deck screws allowed the diagonal sides to attach easy with a title-bond glue to lock it all up.

Step 2:

Step 3: The Tower

The tapered dowel tower is just a section of an old wooden baseball bat. I just eye-balled what section was a good size. The top of the tower are 3 circular pieces cut out of the 1x6 wood (see one of my earlier instructables on how to do that,) glued together. Along with 2" deck screw to hold down the tapered dowel (see the pics,) I used a dab of gorilla glue as well on all the tower pieces.

Step 4: Skinning the Castle.

The castle birdhouse is actually done in step two (add drill holes in the top 4 box sections,) but the WOW! factor is not there. This when we really start to make this shine. The first thing to do is put strips of paint sticks on the surfaces. They will make nice horizontal lines for the "bricks" The are cut to size, and glued using either real bricks to weight down the paint sticks while gluing or if you have to cut extra pieces of wood lay them down the other way and pinch that wood onto the paint stick panels with clamps. Just try and get them reasonably straight.

Step 5: Parapets

Got to have the parapets. they are also cut from the paint sticks in strips and I used a chisel to knock out sections. those knocked out sections were then used on the tower. A black sharpie marker is used to draw in the brick lines. A 1.25" circle cut bit to cut the 4 additional entrance holes that will be the windows. I then used an orbital sander first with 80 grit sand paper to round off every edge and then 120 grit to smooth all the surfaces and more rounding of the edges. This really makes things look nice.

Step 6: Stain, Poly and More Details

After marking with the sharpie all the windows and doors and brick edges I cut some squares out of a sponge and use golden oak stain over everything. For the circles that are pretending to be the crank for the chain for the drawbridge and the drawbridge piece itself, I use a very dark jacobian bean stain. The Drawbridge does not actually go up and down, and a bridge piece of wood attaches the doorstep to the drawbridge on the underside. I also added detail to the windows and door frames in the form of coffee stirrer wood from the coffee shop. The chain actually supports the drawbridge

All of the flags and stuff are not on for the staining. At this time we need to do the poly-urathane. The first two coast are a mix of Oil-based polyurathane semi-gloss and teak oil. The teak oil mixes perfectly with the poly-urathane and when applied to the wood the teak oil is sucked into the wood dragging the polyurathane into the wood. this makes a really good base for polyurathane. If you skip this then the polyurathane will just coat the wood and in a year or two peel off like paint. Allow time between coats to dry.

Now that I think about it, I actually spent over a week putting a coat of poly-urathane on the birdhouse. A coat in the morning before work, and then a second coat on when I got home. so in all some 14 coats of poly-urathane.

Step 7: The Final Touch.

$0.89 from Temu.com how could I resist the lego castle guards and Archers. I just trimmed the trees this fall and made sure to cut a nice flat spot to put the castle. Hopefully the branches will grow in all around it.