Wooden Bird House Plant Pot (with Tinkercad Version)

From Terracotta, over ceramic to plastic pots. As a proud plant parent you may already have your fair share of pots for your beloved roommates, this project could give you the inspiration for something a little different, to bring nature even closer to your home.

What started off as a house for birds during the wintertime turned into a cozy, wooden home for my indoor plants as it got warmer. You can get extremely creative with the plants you decide to plant into the wooden home, hanging plants sure are a beautiful choice for this accomondation.

The next time you go for a walk just collect some branches to bring home with you, grab some wooden panels, maybe leftovers from other projects, and you can already get started!

Supplies

wood panels
branches (different diameters)
sand paper
nails & screws
sawtooth, screwdriver or drill
plastic foil
your favorite plant and quality soil
optional: a blow torch and some yarn

Step 1: Sketch

Bring the idea in your head onto paper. Maybe think about where you want the house to stand after it's finished, if it needs to be painted waterproof for outdoors, if it needs something to stand on...

Step 2: Foundation

Mark the size you want your base panel to be and saw/cut it into shape.

Step 3: Outline

Cut 4 panels into size to drill them onto the foundational panel. Work your way around the entire panel so it shapes a kind of "fence" (so the water doesn't just drip down your bird house when you water your plants).

Before you drill the outlining panels onto the ground, measure the diameter of your screws and drill holes in their size into all of the panels to prevent the screws from splitting the wood (talking from experience here, the reason we had to start the project over in the beginning).

Step 4: Optional: Pedestal

This step is totally optional. For outdoors we wanted our house to sit on a stick so we'd be able to place it into the earth.

Carve a hole in with the diameter of your standing stick into the middle of the bottom panel.

Step 5: Let's Burn It Down!

No, not really. It shouldn't have gone that wrong just yet! But at this point you can grab your blow torch and start painting the foundation with flames, this is especially nice if you are using leftover wood that's maybe not the most interesting or pretty one, flaws can just be painted over.

After blow-torching the wood, sand it with sand paper afterwards to prevent the soot from staining everything it touches.

Step 6: Start Building the Roof

Plants need light to live, indoors in our urban joungles especially, as much as they can get. Knowing this basic fact it would be counterproductive to build a fully covered roof onto the house. Since we still wanted this project to look house-like, we decided on the roof tp be a climbing foundation for the plants, so they could start growing and covering the roof by themselves.

For this step, cut out 4 thicker branches that you're going to glue into the foundational penal to serve as columns and a base for your roof.

First drill or carve holes into the foundation, not all the way through, just enough to be able to stick and glue the branches into the wood.

Step 7: Roof Construction

The roof construction is probably easier to explain with pictures than with words. We used nails to stabilize the branches on one another, carving the meeting points out beforehand to they'd fit better on top of each other.

Finally, we wraped some yarn around the meeting points for decoration and a little more stability.

Step 8: Buildung Up Walls

For the main part of your plant pot, measure out the inside of the house (the space that the colums surround) and cut 8 pieces of wood into these kind of puzzle-shapes to be able to stack them on top of each other.

On the longer sides of the two bottom plates cut out some room to serve as a drainage hole (see last picture).

Step 9: Create Steepness

This step could probably also be optional, but for the water to seep down to the drainage hole easier drill a short piece of wood into the middle of the ground plate, screwing thinner pieces onto the sides (see pictures) to create these steep sides.

Step 10: Final Step

Finally, cut out some plastic foil and line the inner space of the house with it. To pervent it from slipping down, we nailed the foil to the wood. Cut some drainage holes into the foil before or after covering the inside with it.

You can now fill the space with earth and your plants of choice. Again, hanging or climbing plants are amazing for this, while some cacti would be just as cute and happy in this home. :)