CRAFTING: The Upcycled Birdhouse Challenge

Over the last few weeks, myself and 20 selected bloggers have been squirrelling away taking part in the Make a House a Home birdhouse upcycling challenge, hosted by Ocean Finance. Not only do we get to design and keep our birdhouses, but there is also a chance to win a £200 voucher to spend at luxury gift and designer homeware site, Amara (have you seen their bed linen – it’s GORGEOUS!) I am always on the lookout for a new crafting project, so I definitely had to take part. The challenge was simple – we all received a plain wooden birdhouse and a voucher for £25 to spend at Buddly Crafts to buy materials of our choice for our upcycled birdhouse, the rest was down to us.

I spent quite a while mulling over my birdhouse, what would my local birds like? What would make them feel extra special? At first I thought I’d go for a beach hut look, but that was just too simple – I live in Brighton where we have an abundance of beach huts for our local birds to set up camp in, this had to be better. That’s when I came up with the idea to create the Royal Box. 

Our garden has a beachy colour scheme, both our garden shed and picket fencing is painted in a turquoise colour (you can see behind) – this has weathered quite a lot now, but I like the ‘vintage look’ so to fit in with our current theme, I starting off by painting my birdhouse with a coat of Chalky Look Vintage paint, which I then lightly sanded down to give a slightly weathered appearance.

To make my birdhouse truly fit for a Queen, I then used majestic gold paints to add a touch of elegance and class, as you know, our Brighton birds are super classy and special (minus the seagulls). I used a stencil to create the Royal Birdy Crown Jewels on each side and added some golden trimming.

Ta Da! One Vintage Style Royal box, which is now taking pride of place in our garden, eagerly awaiting our first arrivals to move in to keep warm over the winter.