Graham recently brought home a birdhouse that our neighbors didn’t want anymore. Great, I thought, more stuff! You know how I feel about excess stuff in my home. (In case you don’t: I hate it!) But last week we came up with an idea for what to do with it. He wanted to make it look like the moss little house we bought at the Glenwood Arts Festival last year and I immediately got up, grabbed the reindeer moss we had left from my vertical air plant garden, and started glueing.

Now that I think about it, he was probably trying to trick me into decorating it for him, but that’s OK. I actually enjoyed doing it, and it didn’t take long at all. You can find a birdhouse to decorate at a crafts store. This triple birdhouse is affordable.

I started by using the purple moss we had left. I found ours at Gethsemane Garden Center in Chicago, aka heaven, but you can also find it online or at a crafts store.

I had some orange left over as well, so I alternated between orange and purple. I used the same glue for air plants as I did for my air plant garden. (E6000 craft glue works, too.) If you have unused plastic flatware from when you order takeout, you can use it to smooth the glue evenly over the surface. (Or use whatever tool you have to do this.) Note: I recommend wearing gloves when working with colored moss because it dyes your fingers. Trust me, I learned this the hard way. It comes off, of course, but still.

Getting the moss in the inner parts of the roof was tricky. I used a plastic knife to smooth glue over it evenly and then pushed pieces of moss on little by little.

When I ran out of moss, we headed back to Gethsemane because it occurred to me that I should get some air plants to put inside all the little doors and windows, plus two on the sides. I used the smallest air plants I could find for the windows, slightly larger ones for the doors and two larger plants on the sides. Play with the placement of the air plants before glueing.

I glued the air plants on first and then found some green moss to put around the bottom of the house, but in hindsight I would have glued that moss on first.

Not counting the time it took us to drive to the garden center, the entire project took me about 25 minutes, if that long. I turned something I viewed as clutter into a part of our little indoor garden, and now I wouldn’t dare get rid of it. 

That’s something I’ve been discovering lately about things to declutter. I notice some things I don’t really care about and donate or toss, while others just need a little bit of love to be useful and/or beautiful again.

Have you done any crafts or gardening lately? Tell me about it in the comments!

Related posts:

• Air plant garden class with Dabble
• New plants and making another air plant garden
• Plant collection and Earth Day haul

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