Building a Bat House

I've lived in many states across the US over the years since my family was an Air Force family. We have always seen bats at night and even had a few fly into the house, sunroom or get stuck under an awning roof. We have never had the problem of the bats roosting in the eaves of our house until we moved to Michigan. 

I wouldn't have minded so much if the bats were a clean animal, but they are not. The eaves of our house hang over our deck in the front and rear of the house and the bats seem to poop their body weight nightly. I decided to build a Bat House in the hoped of attracting the bats away from the house and to maybe get a few more bats and keep the bugs down a bit more (mosquitos are really bad out here.)

Here is a picture of what the Bat House looks like finished for those of you not interested in the construction of the project. If you want to see how it was built, keep on reading.

The first step after coming up with a plan was to cut out most of the pieces. As you can see in the picture below all pieces are cut from a single 4'x4' sheet of 3/8" plywood. On the left we have the two front pieces and the back, in the middle is the right and left side, and on the right is the 2 baffles, the top and the baffle spacers. I did not cutout the roof yet, I will explain why down when I actually cut it out.

Before attaching the sides to the back piece I cut out a couple notches for ventilation.

Here I attached the sides and top to the back piece, I left about 1 and 3/8"  space on the bottom to attach the bat house to the tree and the same distance at the top. I pre-drilled pilot holes with a countersink bit and used 1" drywall screws to attach everything.

The next step was to attach the mesh screen, this is a plastic screen door mesh. All of the plans and videos online say to make sure to use the plastic type of mesh not the metal ones. I used my staple gun to secure the mesh and then tapped the staples with my hammer to make sure they were nice and flat.

On either side of the bat house here we have spacers that are 3/4" tall which is the recommended amount of space for the baffles. I used two strips of the plywood to make sure the screws didn't poke through. I just clamped them down and drilled pilot holes and then screwed them in with the same 1" drywall screws. I did have to cut this set of spacers in half to allow for the ventilation. The rest of the spacers are not cut.

Here we have the full length spacers with the first baffle in place. You can see that the baffle has been wrapped all the way around with the mesh. Again I just stapled it down and tapped the staples with my hammer to make sure they were flush. I repeated this same process for the second baffle.

With the second baffle and spacer in place I put mesh on the inside of the front sections and attached them to the sides. I didn't glue or screw either of the baffles in place. In order to secure them I put small spacer blocks at the bottom on either side to stop them from sliding down and out.

From the side here you can see where the roof needs to be attached. Now at this point I hadn't cut the roof piece out. I decided to wait on this because I'm lazy and didn't want to do the math before hand to figure out how long it needed to be. With it put together this far I was able to just stick a piece of scrap wood there and mark it to length.

With the roof piece marked to length I cut it down to size on my table saw and then screwed it down to the side pieces.

Next I ran a bead of weatherproof caulk down the two seams to make sure the bats stay dry inside of the house.

I hung the bat house outside under our deck and gave it 3 coats with a tan exterior spray paint. It didn't coat as well as I would have liked. If I were to do it again I would get regular canned paint and probably prime it then paint it with a brush or small roller.

Below you can see the finished product hanging from a tree in our back yard. I do have some fly paper hanging from the tree below the bat house to try and attract the bats here. It has only been hanging for a few days so I don't know if we have any residents yet.

Quick and Simple Dry Erase Marker Tray

Recently we hung a whiteboard in my wife's office. The whiteboard was nice, however there was no place near the whiteboard to put the markers and erasers. I decided to surprise her with a marker tray to put underneath the whiteboard. I had picked up some spare pine boards 1"x6"x4' which happened to be the exact width of the whiteboard.

I started off by squaring the edges of the board on my table saw. Next I took a 1/2 inch round nose bit and used my router to make  3 grooves for the markers.  The last step was to put a chamfer on the top edges to remove the hard edge. 

Before staining the wood I got out my orbital sander and gave the board a good sanding. Started with 150 grit and then moved up to 220 after that. I also took some sand paper and just ran it over the grooves by hand just to make sure nobody gets a splinter when trying to grab a marker.

We used the same Provincial stain that we used on the Spool Tree and only gave it one coat since the wood seemed plenty dark after the first coat.

Sewing Adventures

Last weekend, we went shopping for a new sewing machine.  I was hoping for a Janome, but due to the dealer being closed for the holiday weekend, I ended up at a great sewing store where I fell in love with the Husqvarna Viking Opal 670.

Since bringing the machine home, I've been a bit zealous.  Once I started feeling confident with using the machine, I decided to use my enthusiasm to learn some of the techniques that are rumored to be challenging or seem interesting and advanced to me.  First up, elastic.

I decided to make a plastic bag holder to hang in the kitchen instead of just having a bundle of bags hanging around.  The only problem I experienced was that the safety pin I used to pull the elastic through the casing ripped out just as I got it through the very end.  Fortunately I caught it with my fingers and I didn't have to redo that piece.  I put the end a little further inward for the second piece of elastic.  With this success under my belt, I moved on to buttonholes.

I didn't actually have anything to put a button hole in, so I just took a scrap of fabric and had at it. Other than my initial surprise of the machine sewing the first line backwards to set the length of the button hole, which went past the edge of my fabric, I thought the process was great.  A bit of adjusting the placement for the buttonhole led me to success.

After so much success with my new machine, I decided to get really brave.  My next attempt was going to utilize a pattern and a zipper.

I'm still somewhat astounded by how well this bag came out.  I did get confused with what to cut out for one of the pattern pieces, but once I went to use the piece I was able to figure it out and cut it the way it needed to be.  As for the zipper, I tried to follow the patterns directions, but ended up ripping out the stitches.  I looked at some tutorials online, and decided to try one of those methods.  All in all, I like the way the zipper fit into the bag, but I've made some notes with a few things to try changing up for the next zippered bag I make.  Particularly to stop stitching further away from the zipper pull, so I don't break a needle again.  I'm chalking it up to just another sewing experience accomplished.

Tree Spool Holder

Welcome to the inaugural post from West Mitten Crafts.
You might be asking what is West Mitten Crafts? Well it is a new business that my wife (Stacey) and I (Lee) are starting from home. We plan on selling products on etsy and local craft shows. Along the way however we are going to be creating some YouTube videos and blog posts with progress on different projects with woodworking, crochet, knitting and a few more.

To kick things off I would like to start with a project that I did for my wife's birthday. I had promised her a bookshelf in the shape of a tree (check it out here), but the craft room where it was supposed to go was not complete (still isn't). I still wanted to get her something to help her in her crafts and organization.

I ended up making a spool tree to hold her sewing thread. I started the project out of a 3/4 inch sheet of poplar plywood 4 foot x 4 foot. I hand drew a tree on the board and cut it out with a jig saw.

A few notes about using a jigsaw. I was getting a lot of tearing or chipout when using the jigsaw. I found out after cutting out the tree and reading the manual that there are settings on the jigsaw that let you change the way the blade moves through the wood. I was on the wrong setting when I cut the tree out but it still came out okay, just took a little extra sanding.

The plan was to use 1/4 inch dowel rods sticking straight out to hand the spools of thread. After talking to a fried about the project he suggested using a larger dowel rod going into the tree and a smaller dowel rod into the larger one making a little L shape or what looked like a pipe. The picture you see below has holes drilled for the dowels to go into. The holes were drilled using a forstner bit.

After drilling the holes we stained the tree. Before applying the stain to the actual tree my wife and I applied some to a scrap piece, and its a good thing we did. Originally we had purchased a Sedona red color stain and it did not look good on this type of wood. I had a little bit of the stain you see called Provincial and it looked good on the scrap piece so we just picked up a bigger can to do the entire tree.

The next step was to glue in the dowels. We turned some of the dowels so that the spools wouldn't all be going the same way. I think it makes it look more natural this way. You can see Stacey with a slight smirk of glee holding up her new tree.

Here is the final product after three coats of Minwax Polycrylic.

The tree blends in with the wood paneling a little too well, but I still think it came out well overall. When the tree goes to its real home in the craft room which will have drywall and some paint it should standout and be a real nice piece of functional art.

Update: I have added a new picture with the painted drywall background.