How To Turn An Old, Broken Garden Tool Into A Birdhouse

Quality gardening tools can last upward of 30 years, if not an entire lifetime with proper maintenance. Keeping your shovels, hoes, rakes, and other tools clean and in tip-top shape will improve their performance as well as prevent the spread of disease if you're dealing with issues like saving your garden plants from tomato blight. However, regardless of what you do, you may still have to replace your tools due to unforeseen circumstances. The heavy work of lifting with a shovel might break the wood or bend the metal, for example, or you might come across defects like loose connections. Just because you can't go back to using the broken garden tool as intended doesn't mean you shouldn't give it a second life by repurposing their wooden handles as the pole for a birdhouse.

There are plenty of brilliant ways to repurpose old garden tools in and around your house, but having a pre-made, rounded pole to hold up your bird box is worth the time you'd save DIYing your own on a lathe. Different birds will be attracted to birdhouses at varying heights, for example a chickadee prefers being 5 to 10 feet up, whereas an eastern bluebird sticks around 4 to 6 feet. Cut an old garden tool to your desired size by removing the head of the shovel, rake, or whatever application is at hand, as well as the grip at the base. Any woodworking tool should serve the purpose, whether it's a handheld saw or powered circular saw, but make sure to sand down the prospective top half so it will be easier to install the box. The bottom half could also be narrowed into a stake so it's easier to drive that old handle into the ground.

If your first instinct is that turning old, broken garden tools into a birdhouse pole feels unnecessary when you can just hang the nest from a tree, you should reconsider. Boxes directly attached to trees are less likely to be used because they can be more easily stalked by predators — especially if the entrance hole is big enough for unwanted species like squirrels to move through. Birds are also picky about where they want to build a nest, so the tree in your backyard might not have an ideal surrounding habitat. Using a birdhouse attached to an old garden tool pole gives you more flexibility on placement, which is especially important for spacing different nests a couple hundred feet apart to avoid territorial fighting.

Creating a birdhouse pole is one great way to reuse the handle of a shovel or rake, but other components of old garden tools can be turned into additional features that birds will love. If the head of a shovel isn't too bent, you can attach it to a bird feeder as a landing place for birds to find a lot of seed. Better they be used on a feeder rather than a birdhouse, especially if you're looking to attract cavity-nesting birds. These species do not need a perch; having a perch will instead make it easier for predators to enter the birdhouse. Meanwhile, the handle grip could be attached to the sides of your birdhouse for easier carrying, but these may be better utilized in other DIY projects like installing new drawer pulls.