Spring Time Gourde Birdhouses

Create a birdhouse out of gourdes and turn your garden space or porch into a cute haven for birds!

We came across a couple of gourds that were good and dried out and thought in honor of spring finally being upon us we would make some cute little birdhouses!

1. If your gourds are straight from the field like ours were then they will be a bit on the dirty side. You will need to give them a wash before doing anything further. I recommend just using water and a soft sponge.

2. Let your gourds air dry or pat them dry with a towel.

3. Once your gourds are good an dry it's time to break out the drill. We just used a Black & Decker corded drill. You will need at least a 1" spade bit to make the entrance to the birdhouse. (Ours is a bit rusty, so be careful!)

4. READY, SET, DRILL! Find a spot around 2" from the bottom of the gourd to create the hole for the entrance. (These gourds are little fragile, it doesn't take much to make the hole)

5. Once your hole is drilled it will be a bit rough around the edges so you will need to clean up the rough spots. You can use some sand paper if you want a cleaner edge but we decided we liked the broken edge look so we went with a drill bit to knock off excess pieces of gourd.

6. You may use whatever utensil you like to clean out the extra stuff on the inside you don't want in there. We used the 1" spade bit for the job.

7. This is one of my favorite parts! It's time to dump out all the seeds and inner lining of the gourd.

8. Now we will take our drill bit and make a hole near the top all the way through so that we can hang the bird houses.

9. Now it's time to hang your gourds. You can do these individually but we wanted to hang both of our birdhouses together so they would twist in the wind and be decorative even if no little birds make homes in them. We decided to use an old wire coat hanger we found.

10. We straightened out the wires using a pair of pliers after removing the cardboard tubing and fed them through the holes we drilled earlier.

11. Push your clothes hanger through the pre-drilled holes at the top of the gourd, bend the clothes hanger up around the top and and twist the clothes hanger tightly without damaging the gourd.

12. Now, bend the clothes hanger on each side so the gourds will balance out nicely.

13. You can leave your gourd birdhouses the way nature made them or you can get creative and paint them or stain them! We went with paint! Find a good place to paint your gourds and go at it! We used Krylon Fusion spray paint to get a solid white canvas to work with.

14. Finally, you can paint your awesome gourd bird houses any way you wish! This is a great project for the family and they are really cool to hang in your garden, front porch or just hang around in the trees!