WYLTC July 2011 Project...Super-Sized Bird House!!!!

*Did you notice there was no August "Wood You Like to Craft?" project?
Our lives all got a little crazy this month so we decided to take a break until September.
If you follow along with WYLTC you'll need to know that all the action will now take place on the main site page-no more hopping from blog to blog trying to find a project!
If you don't follow us, you should!
It's a ton of fun and so many great ideas are shared there.
Just a head's up, September's theme is "SHELVES". If you've got one, built one, redone one or want to create one we'd love to have you share it with us. Stay tuned to the Wood You Like to Craft? site for all the fun, and until then here's a recap of my July project for our bird house theme...

Hey there!

 It's Wendy here, visiting my buddy Melinda all the way from Texas!

I'm so happy to be back at her place, just hanging out, sharing a  little girl talk, conjuring up a little something...we used to do it daily, now we have to do it through our blogs.

But I'm so glad we do!

 I personally think Melinda is one of the most creative people I've ever met and being able to share in her talents, in-person or on-line, I'll take any day.

On that note, let me introduce you to my take on Melinda's bird house project...

Once again, I went large.

 (I seriously think I have a size problem!)

I'm working on creating a fun, relaxing space on my back patio and needed a piece that would fit in, so the Super-sized bird house was born!

Super easy to make, and better I had all the supplies lying around my house.

(Yeah, that might not be a "better" thing...)

Anyway I used a few scrap pieces of 1x6 for the "house" part, a chunk of 2x3 for the base, and a few pieces of 1x3 for the roof line.

I took a page from Melinda's book and officially measured nothing, totally eyeballed it!

I started by mitering the ends of my 1x6 boards. Two at a solid 45 degrees and for the center piece, I found the middle and did a 45 degree cut out from there to create the point.

From there I laid the pieces side by side lining up the cuts of the roof and decided how big I wanted the house to be and cut the boards off there.

I sat and stared at the pieces for a while and decided I didn't like the house that square. So I marked off a slight angle on the two outside boards and cut it with my scroll saw.

Much better!

Here she is all cut and ready to get pretty.

The base is just a bit bigger than the 1x6's.

 To get the roof pieces, I lined up the 1x3 even with the top of the roof line on one side and cut it.

 I then laid that cut piece back into place and put another piece of 1x3 on the other side of the roof so that the top point was squared and then cut it.

(The second piece should be about 3/4 of an inch bigger than the first)

I painted and sanded each piece next.

I really wanted to emphasis that it was pieced together so I hit the edges pretty hard.

From there I nailed her all together and she was looking kind of house-y.

Big! and house-y, she stands just over 2 feet tall!

I wanted a display piece so I simple added an eye screw to the base so I could change my decor with the season or my mood.

Right now she's sporting a pretty heart bucket filled with flowers to match my patio color scheme.

I just ran a length of ribbon through the eye screw for easy changing.

There we go! One really big, chippy, happy bird house!

Start to finish in just over an hour.

Super fun and super easy. Thanks Mel for the play date! Let's do it again soon-

Feel free to stop on over at my neck of the woods anytime.

Happy Crafting.