Our Upcycled Fairy Garden House – How To

In June I shared with you our super fun fairy garden, as I mentioned in the post we didn’t buy anything but the succulents for our garden and either upcycled everything or found them outside (minus the hot glue, of course!). Today I’m going to share with you how I created our fairy garden from an up-cycled Honest Shampoo & Body Wash bottle (their conditioner bottle or lotion would work exactly the same too – but really any bottle will work that you have around, lets be honest).

We had a ton of fun and did this together. Honestly, the house just kept evolving from the first version (the no rock version) as I wanted it to be more “earthy” and I’m so glad it did. A was a big help throughout the entire project. Obviously it should go without saying she wasn’t allowed to use the items that could hurt her – the hot glue gun or the end cutting pliers. I did let her press things into the hot glue with supervision on the larger less intricate pieces so she wouldn’t burn her fingers.

We have an old dead tree out back that was here when we moved in and never in my life did I think it would be so useful for anything but a place for birds to perch. We used several of the long skinny dead branches to snap into 3″-4″ pieces for the roof and A just thought it was a blast! I wasn’t worried about the length being the same so we just used our fingers to break everything into pieces. It felt more rustic and “fairy” like to have varying lengths for the roof. We used pieces of the bark for the tops of the steps too. We took an afternoon to go to the park for a few hours and while we there picked up some park rocks from the playground. They were the perfect size and we didn’t need many in the grand scheme of the park – ha!

For the base of the house (which really you could skip that part if you wanted, we originally went that direction for the look of the house and added the rocks as a second thought…but I feel like it gave it extra support) we used Popsicle/wooden sticks. We got a huge box of crafting Popsicle/wooden sticks of all sizes on clearance last year and they were perfect for this project. The varying sizes were great for the windows and doors.

What you will need:

A bottle of your choice. We used an Honest bottle because we have several of them since we only use Honest on our kiddos.
Hot Glue (lots!) & hot glue gun
Popsicle Sticks
Small dead branch sticks (for the roof)
Small Rocks (the small rocks from your local park work fantastic)
Misc items for embellishing your house
Optional – flat pieces of bark.
End cutting pliers or diagonal cutting pliers

Instructions:

1. Cut down your bottle to the height that you want your house to be.

2. Break off your sticks to the length you would like them to be for the roof. I recommend making them over hang the top of the bottle a bit. Then hot glue. I recommend putting your hot glue at the top of the lid and the bottom for best anchoring.

3. Cut down your thin Popsicle sticks (if you are doing this step for the whole house). Apply the sticks with hot glue all of the way around the house.

4. Cut the tops off of rounded Popsicle sticks for the windows and the door at the desired size. (My sticks broke in half naturally, which worked great for the windows. It took a couple tries for an uncracked. Apply at the desired locations around the house.

4. Embellish the door however you choose.

5. If you are applying a stair case like our finished product – now owls be the time to build it. We created ours with 2 wide Popsicle sticks cut down to our desired height on both sides, hot glued them together and then added the flat stair pieces and upright horizontal “kick plate” piece. Then glue to the fair house.

6. Apply small rocks to the entire home using hot glue. This is time consuming but we felt like it brought so much to the house.

7. Add flat pieces of bark to the stairs.