birdhouse
During our summer visit to the cabin in the early eighties with uncle Bill and grandad, my brother and I each had a little project. At least I think we did, because I had a little project, and I remember my brother doing something else while I was working on mine, but I don't remember what his project was. My project was building a birdhouse.
There were a few scraps of plywood next to the wood pile, a few jars of nails and a few cans of paint on the porch. I used an old bow saw and hand saw to cut the plywood. I didn't think too carefully about the design and ended up going for a simple box, instead of something with a sloped roof. There was no tool to bore a large hole in the plywood, so I cut the front piece of plywood in half, then cut out two triangles. I used an old file to file the triangle shapes into approximate semicircles, then used two small pieces of wood to attach the two halves back together so the semicircles met and formed a reasonable hole.
I painted the inside of the bird box black. The paint didn't seem to dry completely, even after hours, so maybe it was too old, or maybe I didn't stir it enough. I painted the outside of the box yellow (the choice of colors being limited to what had been left on the porch of the cabin). I slathered on a lot of paint on the seams of the box, hoping to seal them, but without too much success, since my hand sawing didn't result in the straightest of cuts.
When it was done, and the paint was dry enough for me to handle it, I nailed it to a spruce tree behind the cabin. I was pretty proud of it, and took a picture of it with my Kodak disc camera.
When I was nailing it together, it seemed a little bit rickety, and I wasn't sure how long it would hold together. I also wasn't sure if I'd made a useful birdhouse, because I remembered something about how the hole in a birdhouse should be a certain size, related to the size of the house and how far from the bottom it was. I thought maybe no birds would be interested in it, and it would just fall apart anyway. But it didn't fall apart, at least not for the decade or so I visited the cabin after that. And when I looked in the hole during a visit a few years later, it had some kind of nest in it, so something must have found it useful.
There were a few scraps of plywood next to the wood pile, a few jars of nails and a few cans of paint on the porch. I used an old bow saw and hand saw to cut the plywood. I didn't think too carefully about the design and ended up going for a simple box, instead of something with a sloped roof. There was no tool to bore a large hole in the plywood, so I cut the front piece of plywood in half, then cut out two triangles. I used an old file to file the triangle shapes into approximate semicircles, then used two small pieces of wood to attach the two halves back together so the semicircles met and formed a reasonable hole.
I painted the inside of the bird box black. The paint didn't seem to dry completely, even after hours, so maybe it was too old, or maybe I didn't stir it enough. I painted the outside of the box yellow (the choice of colors being limited to what had been left on the porch of the cabin). I slathered on a lot of paint on the seams of the box, hoping to seal them, but without too much success, since my hand sawing didn't result in the straightest of cuts.
When it was done, and the paint was dry enough for me to handle it, I nailed it to a spruce tree behind the cabin. I was pretty proud of it, and took a picture of it with my Kodak disc camera.When I was nailing it together, it seemed a little bit rickety, and I wasn't sure how long it would hold together. I also wasn't sure if I'd made a useful birdhouse, because I remembered something about how the hole in a birdhouse should be a certain size, related to the size of the house and how far from the bottom it was. I thought maybe no birds would be interested in it, and it would just fall apart anyway. But it didn't fall apart, at least not for the decade or so I visited the cabin after that. And when I looked in the hole during a visit a few years later, it had some kind of nest in it, so something must have found it useful.
posted by danteand at 10/03/2005 06:50:00 AM
2 Comments:
When I was abut 12, I was helping my mom put up the Christmas lights when I noticed that the lights were each wrapped around a roll of newspaper. I had never noticed this all the years prior. When I removed the lights, I unrolled the newspaper and found it to be an old paper from the early 70s from New York - probably one of the first years my parents were married in NY before they moved.
Newspaper is great stuff. It has so many uses after its initial news purpose has been served, some of which can provide inadvertant historical context. They say the age of newspapers is over though. Unfortunately you'll never find your Christmas lights wrapped in old emails and web pages.
Or maybe you will.
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