Our COVID Side Hustle is "Ferda Berds"

January 2021: almost a year into COVID, and my husband and I were temporarily unemployed. We were together 24/7, which was fine because we enjoy each other’s company. But I knew my husband was getting antsy, and he wanted to take up woodworking. So I asked him to make me a birdhouse.

In early February, he presented me with a tall, slim birdhouse built out of scrap lumber he had in the garage. It was perfect, just what I wanted—but now it was up to me to decorate it. And I wanted it to look like something entirely different than I’d ever seen.

I painted it lime green and decorated it with old buttons, glass beads, and a couple of little tchotchkes I made with polymer clay. Everything was vintage (buttons from my dad’s button box) or upcycled. We used two license plates for the roof. I took pictures and posted our little project on my personal Facebook page, and then we hung it in the crab apple tree in our front yard.

Less than a day later, comments began rolling in.

“I want one!”

“Oooh, are you selling them?”

“I need one just like that for the cottage!”

I read out the posts to my husband. “What are we going to do?” I asked. “Do you think we can make a couple for our friends?”

He assured me he had extra scrap lumber, and I put together a cost sheet to ensure we weren’t paying our friends to take them. Cost recovery kind of thing, something I certainly wasn’t good at.

At first, I took an order for a neighbor—two, please—and then I was commissioned to make two for a local store.

Within a week, we had five orders, and we needed to come up with a name for our new venture.

“What are we doing this for?” we asked ourselves. We have a large back yard and it’s always full of birds. We were truly building these little houses for our bird friends.

“Ferda birds, eh?” we joked in our Ottawa Valley accents. “That’s it! We’ll call it Ferdaberds!”

After that, our COVID hobby began turning into a small cottage industry. And the orders kept coming. I’d post pictures and get another order. I’d show one person and two more people wanted their own Ferdaberd.

By the end of April, we’d made 40. Friends donated buttons and other items that could be used to customize the birdhouses. We began getting custom requests for retirement gifts, birthday celebrations, christenings, housewarmings, baseball teams, and local businesses. We set up a small assembly line, and a corner of the basement was dedicated to painting and decorating.

I discovered that with each custom design I was setting the bar higher, and that the simple buttons and bright paint weren’t going to cut it anymore. I learned to craft shapes and designs, approximations of trees, boats and people in them, family pets, and entire landscapes. I utilized rocks and shells and twigs and pinecones…whatever I could find to make each Ferdaberd unique and memorable. Our new venture was just the boost of creativity I needed to stave the glumness of COVID.

Together my husband and I built Ferdaberds that now reside in eleven states and five provinces. Our little birdhouses fly international!

At Christmas, I was honored to design and decorate a birdhouse for a retired Canadian Peacekeeper. For that, I used old military buttons, a Canadian victory nickel from 1945, and hand-sculpted poppies. Perhaps our proudest Ferdaberd moment.

Each Ferdaberd is created with a great deal of love and thought, and that’s why they’ve become so popular. Business has been all word-of-mouth. We name, number, and sign each one. Structurally, they are solid and functional; we’ve had birds create nests in all of ours, and others tell me the same thing.

I’m not sure we knew what we were getting into when my husband presented me with my first little birdhouse, but it’s been a fun journey. We’re working on numbers 117 and 118 now, and I expect that we’ll keep building Ferdaberds for some time—until it stops being fun.

During COVID, these perky little dwellings spread some hope—that spring will come, that birds will nest, and that creativity and love can help brighten our darkest days.