backyard – Eco Home Ideas

These Are The Coolest Backyard Projects To Do With The Kids

One of the best things about summer is to be able to spend time outside. Warm air, sunshine and longer days are perfect to start outdoorsy projects that will keep your children entertained and make them love the outdoors as much as you do. You don’t need to be Martha Stewart to make something beautiful, you just need to be creative and think outside of the box. So roll up your sleeves and take note of these cool backyard projects to do with the kids.

Make a butterfly feeder

Who doesn’t love butterflies? They are pretty and colorful and bring life to any garden. Attract them to your backyard with this easy project that even the youngest children can do. The easiest “butterfly food” to make is overripe fruit. Moths and butterflies love it and all you have to do is wait a bit for those bananas and strawberries at home to turn a bit mushy and soft. Get a ceramic or glass plate or a terra cotta plant saucer, any dish with a sloping rim will do. Ask your kids to decorate it however they want with paint or gluing pieces of ceramics in it to create colorful designs. The brighter the better and if they feel like gluing silk flowers to the rim, that’s great too. Now suspend it using flower pot hangers or a macrame holder, hanging it from a tree to keep it under the shade. It’s better if you can easily see it from your house or your patio chairs and it will work best if you hang it a little bit higher than your tallest flowers. Place the slices of overripe fruit on it and wait. If it’s dry out, sprinkle them with water or fruit juice. Replace the fruit when it’s too dry or it becomes moldy.

Build a fairy house or garden

Bring some magic right to your garden by building a house (or a tiny village!) for fairies. The best part about this project is that you can be as creative as you want to use the space around your garden. If you have a big tree with flowers around it, for example, you can add a tiny wooden door to the base and put up tiny windows or decorations of any sort. You can turn rocks into fairy houses and even create a tiny village from scratch on a patch of your garden. Tree stumps are fantastic fairy buildings and old bird feeders can be filled with soil, small plants and colorful rocks to make a fairy garden as well. You can make it as detailed as you want and you enlist the help of your older children to make a surprise for the younger ones. It is really difficult to stop believing in magic when confronted with a whimsical miniature village right outside of your home.

Turning Recyclable Items Into Fashionable Backyard Décor

Save those bottles! Save those boxes! Save anything recyclable because it can totally be reused again but in a cute way. Decorate your backyard with new items from things that you would normally recycle. It can be so much fun. Plus who does not love decorating? You can involve the whole family and make it a cohesive fun project. First, you want to put everything in separate piles so that way you know what you are working with. Next, you want to go to the craft room and get all the supplies. Remember to get all the scraps from your craft room because they will be greatly used. Finally, get to making new décor pieces for you backyard.

Here are some great ideas for you to try.

Bird Feeders – These will be great to use outside. Give your back yard a nice touch with homemade bird-feeders. All you have to do is cut a circle (big enough for a bird) about 4 inches from the bottom of the bottle. Now paint the bottle with non-toxic paint in any color. Decorate it with any art that you want. Maybe a welcome sign? Now glue a wooden rod by the hole. Let it dry. Fill it with bird seeds, hang it up and let the birds enjoy the feeder. Beware their cousins, the squirrels, might try to eat the seeds too.

Straw Chimes – These do not make noise but are beautiful to look at. All you need is some imagination. Save straws of many colors and sizes. Use clear thread and creative with the design and length of your chime. You can hang them off tree branches. Use white straws for a more elegant charm. Use colorful straws for a more festive vibe. Use a mixture of sizes for an eclectic look. You can even run a thread through the middle of the chime and add a bell if you want some noise.

Mini-Luminaires – Light up the deck with these unique lights. Cut the bottles in half and paint the bottom half white, red, orange, yellow, or light green. Fill them up with sand (from your backyard) and put tea lights in them.

Cardboard Deco Box – Use cardboard boxes as deco pieces on your backyard deck. Paint them and add some flare buy making a collage one with extra scraps of magazine clippings. Paint one box black and the other one white. Stack them on top of each other to get a modern art vibe.

Decoupage Lanterns – Have any leftover balloons? Use them to make decoupage lanterns. Blow up the balloon and tie it. Tape it to a flat surface. Mix glue and water to get a watery sticky glue mixture. Cut strands of colorful paper, magazine clippings, newspaper, etc. Dip them into the mixture and place them on the balloon in random spots until the balloon is covered. Once dried, pop the balloon and pull it out. You have beautiful lanterns to hangs. Add lights to them if you want.

Yes these might seem like little décor items, but trust me, they will elevate your backyard to a whole new level.