The Most Amazing Martin House & Father-in-Law....EVER!!!

Good morning!  Today's post is to show off my incredible new martin house, which was built by my terrific father-in-law, Logan! (Logan is shown in the bottom picture).  Last year the neighbors who live a few houses down from us put up a martin house, and we enjoyed watching the martins flying all last summer. We also enjoyed the fact that we hardly had any mosquitos at all! So, I decided that it would be nice to have a martin house as well!  I enjoy watching the birds, which is why we keep feeders and a bird bath in our back yard, so a martin house would fit nicely into the scene.  I googled "martin house plans", found a really nice plan online for FREE!!  My father-in-law, who is retired, does wood-working, so I asked him if he was interested in building a martin house and he agreed to take on the project if I baked him some pies!  (How can a girl pass up a deal like that???)  Anyway, the martin house is FABULOUS and really, really, big!  It has 8 divided house compartments, a little porch with railings, etc.  We picked up the martin house from him a couple of weeks ago and my hubby, Mike, started figuring out what kind of post to attach it to.  He decided to go with a 16' long treated lumber post, which has

2' buried into the ground in a PVC pipe & then lag-bolted to one

of the main posts of our privacy fence for some extra stability. You

should have seen the two of us trying to raise this VERY HEAVY contraption in the air and get the end of the post down into the pipe that was buried - good heavens!  Well, we did make it happen and now the martin house is sitting pretty 14' in the air in a corner of our back yard!  We'll have to come up with an easier way to do this next year, after he takes it down to clean out the nests...maybe bribe some of our son's buddies with barbequed meat so they'll can come help with this task so that I don't get squashed??  Now I just need to bake Logan some pies...

Have a blessed day!

Becky