Do you have fairies at the bottom of your garden?
Do the fairies help clean your house? Pick up after the kids? Or perhaps hide the odd sock or two? 
Have you ever thought about building a house for the fairies in your garden?
A few weeks back I began to embark on a new project for our garden. Little did I know at the time that it would become a joint project between my husband and myself. He became so excited about my little project that he almost took over and before I knew it, my little magical fairy house was an enormous family project bigger than "Ben Her!"
My advice before you start, plan your strategy wisely. If you want to build something as grand as ours then be my guest and follow my instructions. You can always choose to simplify it and build a fairy house with not quite as much decoration. Whatever you decide, it will still be magical and delight all who set eyes on it. That is, friends, neighbours, and family with imagination. But be warned- be prepared to put in quite a lot of time! It is worth it in the end and we did have a lot of fun and laughs along the way. So worth every minute. It is a great way to spend quality time together and after all, shouldn't everyone have a little magic at the bottom of their garden?
Note: Most of the materials we used were gathered from around our house. So the fairy house was made at very minimal cost.
Step One: Select a suitable plastic container of a size you would like the basic structure to be. We chose an old bucket that had a split in the bottom, useless for water now, but ideal for a fairy house. 
Use a felt tip pen to draw a plan on the bucket then cut out the windows and door.
Step Two: Cover the bucket with a collection of flat stones. River stones work well, we collected ours from the beach. (It was a great excuse for a day out at the beach by the way.) They are in a variety of sizes, shapes and colours. You can use craft glue to stick them on however this takes awhile to dry and they tend to slide if you don't hold them long enough. I found the best tool was a hot glue gun, just be careful not to burn your fingers while manipulating the smaller stones. I admit I had a few blisters!
Step Three: We added an entryway. This is an additional feature of our choice. You can choose to leave off and keep things simple. My husband screwed timber walls to the bucket before adding the roof.
Step Four: Add a roof to your fairy house. Again we used left over timber from the construction of our house. We are lucky to be owner builders so have plenty of material available. We then added packing timber to the roof and spray painted it dark grey to look like shingles.
Step Five: The walls of the entryway are made from paddle pop sticks to resemble timber. I painted them brown.
Step Six: We added a door with a miniature hinge to be able to open and close it.
Step Seven: Cover the windows to help make the inside weather and spider proof with plastic. The plastic is glued on from the inside.
Step Eight: Add any desired additional ornaments. In our case we added a weather vein, spray painted gold. A crooked pipe chimney and a silver satellite dish. To complete the look I added tiny flowers under some of the windows to give the illusion that the fairies had planted their own garden and sprinkled gold fairy dust across the roof. We also found some tiny items from a model ship we had never found the time to construct, so added the lantern, windows and shields. It is amazing what you can find around the house to use to decorate if you have a bit of a rummage. 
Step Nine: Make sure it is sealed from the weather by spraying completely with a varnish.
Step Ten: Add a couple of fairies, select a position in your garden and enjoy the delight on visitors faces.
Here is the finished magical fairy house in our selected spot under our Chinese Elm near my bird house and emu statues. One day I will have the rest of the garden completed around it and hopefully it will be filled with lots of fairies including some of the blue fairy wrens that currently nest in the garden near my kitchen. Perhaps when there are enough small shrubs in this garden they will feel safe to move across.
Do you have a spot to put a fairy house in your garden?
If you build one, send me a photo and I'll add it below. Maybe we could start a collection.
I'm thinking about writing a story about an Aussie fairy family. If you would like to hear more or have any ideas, join me in my awesome readers newsletter group. I'd love to discuss any idea you might suggest.