Getting to the Nuts and Bolts of Bird Houses

Last year, about this time, we started to make bird houses with the idea of keeping it simple.  I always admired the ones you can find at craft fairs with all the salvage using old door knobs, hinges and barbed wire, so we thought we would give it a try.  We divied up the houses and went to work.  Mind you, we've got salvage up the yin-yang so it wasn't hard to slap something together.  He made short work of his half, in fact, he had three done and I was still stumped.  It wasn't that I didn't know what to do it's just I didn't know what to do first.  We had accumulated so many cool knobs and hinges that it should have easy to part with a few, but I was still in the hording stage and couldn't find any I could live without.  Besides, I really wanted to do something more thought out and different.  I didn't want to just 'slap' stuff together.  So, I grabbed the nuts, bolts, washers and any unsalvageable salvage that I could part with and went to work with that.
     And we had a LOT!  We would go to these farm auctions that we knew would have rusted out hardware and buy it all.  Usually, we would get dozens of ball jars full of well sorted hardware for 50 cents.  The old duffers would laugh as they watched me carrying off my treasured bolts and inevitably say something about getting good ones at Ace.  Frankly, I didn't really have a plan back then, I just liked all the rust and knew it had it's use. That's what I envisioned on my bird houses.  Here is this year's results.   All are $30 each.

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