My dad's birdhouse

Here's another post of pictures. My dad's been building a birdhouse mostly from local materials, in the fashion of a log cabin. He's been working on it for quite some time now, but lately it's really begun to come into its own. So I'd like to share some pictures of it that I took today.

Here are shots of the front and back of the birdhouse. The "upstairs" is separated from the main level by a thin sheet of plywood, which is why there's no light shining through the upstairs window. As you can tell by the pictures, the base and roof are also plywood, held up by small blocks of wood in the corners. The walls are from twigs and branches fallen from trees in the area (we generally get a decent number of those with every rain storm). The window shutters are slices of popsicle sticks, the vertical bars held of course by two horizontals and a diagonal, in the traditional fashion. For the back, we've been considering a wall that can be removed or flipped open, for easy access to the inside. The idea currently under consideration is mounting a number of sticks onto a few popsicle sticks, and mounting the arrangement on hinges attached to the few sticks already on the back.

There aren't any ground level decorations along the sides. While you can see light shining through the sides, it's because the twigs don't fit perfectly together. Unlike real logs, it's a lot more difficult to get small tree branches to fit tightly. The gaps might be infilled with twigs at some later point, or they might not. On the right-hand side (looking from the front) there's a gable with window. While there are no features on the left-hand side, the plan is to build a chimney from small stones and pebbles, possibly connected to a hearth and fireplace of the same materials inside.

I can't wait until it's completed. It's such a neat project!