Swallow boxes

I have always had a fascination with birds.  I remember as a child watching the barn swallows diving in and out of the barn at our old farm house on Fairy Chasm Rd , just north of Milwaukee.  The swallows would land in the driveway and pick up something and then swoop gracewfully into the big old barn.  We were not supposed to go in there because it was so rickety, but the swallows entered in and out all summer long.

As an adult I had the chance to live along the Columbia River.  In the spring swallows come when the Chinook Salmon start arriving in the Columbia River Gorge.  20 years ago I bought a swallow box for my home.  I placed it facing east 10 feet off the ground.  The first year it was up it had the first family. After that every year they would come back and have a batch of babies.  It was part of summer to watch the birds raise their families.
 Tree swallows have white chests and iridescent green backs.   In some countries it is considered good luck to have swallows living on your house.  I do not know about that, but I sure like it. 
Here is an amazing utube video about swallows in a house in Japan.

I prefer my swallows outside in a nest box.  So this winter we bought rough cut ponderosa pine and started making tree swallow houses. We made 35 boxes.   We got carried away and next thing we knew we are selling them on . This springwe plan to sell them at the farmers market here.

  

 The design has a small hole that only a tree swallow can fit in.  Also the boxes have a way to be taken down easily.  They are cleaned once a year.  Every couple of years one flies into the house by accident and I just calmly throw a towel over them and gently hold them til they are outside.  Swallows live where there is water near by or plenty of insects.  We put up 3 boxes on the cindercone this spring and two of them got swallows.  Both these boxes were 15 feet up in the air.  The sound they make is delightful. 

Okay, so obsessed is an understatement, but here is a series of u tube videos about a nest box.Check it out.

Nesting

 

Getting Comfortable

Five Hatchlings

Hungary Now

                                                                Leaving home

So tree swallows are fun to watch and you only have to clean their box one time a year.  They are easy keepers and there are lots of them that need a safe nest box. 
  Here are some pictures of the box we built. 

                                                   Special sized entry hole

                                               Opens for easy cleaning

                                                          Air Vents

                                           Use wire or nails for easy hanging

                                                   Close up of rough cut wood.

                                                  30 something boxes

                                                           Air Vents in sides

c

Tool Boxes designed in the OWL BOX Factory

It all started like a slow rolling boulder last fall.   Mom was moving and I had to help John K. with moving his wood stash from her new abode. It was a little like reshuffling two pack rats.   John started recycling wood many years ago, stashing hardware, stashing old roofing, stashing tools, wood stoves, and everyone who knows John, knows he has at least three mega stash piles. When I saw this pile of nice fir from the old East Bank Storage in Portland, OR, I said, John I could make something with this.    I will give you one of whatever I end up making.  I pointed out that this was stashette pile number 29, so he caved under pressure.  That started the idea of making some recycled fir boxes.

Back at the Owl Box Factory we had to first plane it and then stack it til we decided what to do. First we had to make wood storage wall and fine tune the shop.

With winter setting in, we decided to start some projects that have been on the back shelf for awhile, things we always wanted to do. So this started a series of boxes. 
 There was Design 1.  Steve, the designer in residence, had admired this simple box years ago.    This box is a mini Japanese Tool Box.  It was  made out of small pieces of fir from an unknown  previous project,  Here is a picture of these boxes.  They were with nails. These boxes are the perfect size for gambling change and cards.

                                                                               Design 1

                                                                 Design 1 on its side

Next came the full sized Japanese tool boxes with rope handles.  The wood was left over 3/4" by 12" from siding the mortise and tenon cabin/tool shed. It was rough cut fir from a family lumber mill in Trout Lake Washington.   The rope was from a rummage sale.  Design 2 is a utilitarian  tool box.  Mine is in the back of my car to carry tools that I might need.

                                                               Design 2  from my car

This last batch was Design 3. This was the batch using the beautiful old fir.   The goal of this batch was no nails and not stock piling wood forever.    We used every scrape of the old wood, and came up with 11 boxes.  Some are vertical grain fir and some are  face grain.  All finished up very nicely due to their age and they were very stable.  There was some splitting of wood, but that was to be expected.   Cutting them out was easy and fast, the hard part was gluing, sanding, pegging, and designing,  It took awhile......Here are some of them.....   Lots of sanding , and thought went into these boxes.  The handles came out a couple different ways, leather and old rope variations. 

                                                     Design 3  Face Grain box for leather tools

                                                           Design 3 medium and large size

                                                                      Bamboo pegs

                                                                         Handle Close up

                                                               Open box by pushing on lid

                                                                         Joint on lid

We are working on a design/ logo for the projects coming out of our shop.  So far Owl Box Factory is sticking.  30 owl boxes  went out two weeks ago, so the name came honestly.
Here are more pictures of the tool boxes.
http://picasaweb.google.com/gorgeland/ToolChest#

The Old Barn

A wood framed barn is a balancing act.  The best barns are those with a wide open span and a steep roof for storing hay, but wide spans an steep roofs need to be built on a solid framework of post and beams and cross ties.   The trick is, how to use just enough framing to hold the roof up, without giving up the space for stacking hay?

Briliantly simple, a single bolt secures at each joint secures a honeycomb framework of short, weatherbeaten 2 x 10 rafters.  Running at an angle to the arch of the roof, the topside of each  is scribed to an ellipse.  No beams, no posts, no cross ties, what holds this roof up is absolutely brilliant engineering.

Located in western Idaho,  I came across this barn while working as an owl pellet collector.  I was told the barn was built in the 1930's, and at the time a patten was taken out on the engineering of the roof framing.  I have never seen another like it.  80 years later, the roofing long gone and completely exposed to rain and snow, this roof is still dead solid straight as the day it was built.  What more can you say? 

Buffalo Expedition

At 4:45 in the morning I awoke to duelling alarm clocks buzzing away. After the jet fuel was
made, we zoomed down the road for a 8 am meeting in Toppenish Washington. This was the big day for the buffalo pick up we had been planning for the last month. The freezer was bought, and Blaze had been fed the night before, 75 dollars worth of gas. The 120 mile drive was along the Columbia River and then north thru Goldendale to the Yakima Reservation Headquarters. The change from Cascades to desert is always stunning.
There was nothing stunning about Toppenish, except the hot, fresh sugar coated donut at the Mexican bakery next to the quick mart.

We met at the Yakima tribal headquarters and were guided over to the Yakima buffalo ranch. It is 125 acres nestled in Satus wildlife area, 30,000 acres of wetlands. The buffalo was already there. We watched and chatted while George and Dave skinned the hide. They had been working here for 30 years collectively. They had fixed many miles of fences over 30 years.
After the buffalo was skinned we bee-lined it for Parkdale, Oregon . I had dropped off turkeys this summer at a poultry processor, but Mountain Valley Meat is an amazing family run butchering facility. Everything was old, including the board and batten and pot bellied stove in the office. The bathroom was truly ancient and bizarre.

Unwrapping the meat for drop off at the butcher.
Winching the buffalo out of the back of blaze.

Now we wait til the 30th of November for the meat to be done. We are taking 100 pounds and we have 75 pounds for friends and family to buy. It is costing about 4.40 a pound. We can't wait to try it, but it is going to be great to not have to buy beef from the store this winter. At Christmas we can have buffalo tenderloins, yum.