Say Goodbye To Traditional Birdbaths: 5 Easy DIY Solutions

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You don't have to break the bank on a traditional, store-bought basin to give your feathered visitors a place to splash around. With a few inexpensive household materials, a bit of elbow grease, and a dash of creativity, you can DIY a very stylish birdbath at home that complements your garden while giving local wildlife a welcome watery respite.

One of the easiest approaches when building a birdbath is to repurpose materials you already have on hand. An old terracotta saucer, old plants pots, a shallow serving dish, or even a ceramic lamp base can become a functional birdbath with minimal effort. Or you can use thrifted or dollar store items to create attractive birdbaths on a budget. 

Birdbaths make for a perfect home DIY, since they usually don't require advanced woodworking skills or an engineering degree to throw together. Nine times out of ten, all you need is a concave basin and something to add a little height, and you're ready to roll. Just keep in mind that the birds should have no more than 2 inches of water in their bath, and plenty of places to perch. Beyond that, be prepared to refresh the water and clean the basin regularly, and these easy DIYs can turn your backyard into a birdy bathing haven

If you're looking for an easy DIY birdbath, your first step should be a brief trip to the thrift store. Vases and serving dishes are some of the easiest things to upcycle into a charming birdbath. Vases can act as the stand and serving dishes as the birdbath basin. A shallow serving dish is ideal, but a deeper punch bowl also works, as long as you line the bottom with enough garden rocks, glass beads, or other accoutrements so the water isn't more than 2 inches deep. 

Once you've got a bowl and a flower vase, adhere them together with a strong, outdoor-rated adhesive, such as marine epoxy. You can choose to stack multiple vases to create a taller stand, or just use one squat vase for a lower birdbath. For added magic, you can create a light-up design by sticking solar lights inside. Once night falls, these lights will refract off the glass, offering a stunning mosaic pattern that will dance against your yard. One downside to this sparkly idea is that the glass could shatter if something violently tips it over onto a hard surface. Unless you've got roughhousing kids running through the yard, that shouldn't be a problem — but to play it safe you could position this in the middle of a flower bed where it will have a cushioned fall if it does get blown or knocked over. 

If you're a big fan of that concrete birdbath look, but don't want to shell out hundreds of dollars, you can always create your own birdbath by stacking clay pots end to end. Like the previous DIY, this craft involves utilizing a strong adhesive to combine multiple pots into a birdbath. You'll need several clay pots and a pair of saucers. The saucers will serve as the base and the top of the birdbath. You can place a basin on the top one to hold the water, or simply use the plant saucer as a shallow birdbath bowl. 

If you're stacking multiple pots, make sure you fill the lowest one with rocks or sand to give it some weight and prevent the birdbath from being too top heavy. That will prevent the pillar from tipping over with heavy gusts of wind. Once you've got your bottom pot filled, simply affix your pots end-to-end, until you've reached your preferred height.

If you have multiple old plant pots, you can opt to make a tall birdbath — but this DIY can also work with just a single pot and saucer. If you go this route, simply turn the pot upside down and adhere the saucer on top to create a low birdbath. 

Who would have thought you can DIY a birdbath with an automotive staple? Some thrifty bird lovers have realized that plastic oil drain pans, used to collect and store old oil from cars, make for ideal birdbaths on a budget. Needless to say, you probably can't do this with a used drain pan, since scrubbing the oil residue out of it would be an insurmountable hassle. However, you can find very cheap drain pans – Dollar Tree's plastic drain pans are only $1.50. While you're in the dollar store, you can also pick up some affordable plastic plant pots that can serve as your birdbath's pedestal. Alternatively, you can repurpose old pots you already have. 

Like the other DIY birdbaths on this list, this is a straightforward project that shouldn't take more than half an hour of hands-on work to construct. Just affix your oil pan to the plant pots with an outdoor-rated adhesive, and optionally apply a non-toxic paint to the exterior to customize the color.

Once the adhesive and any paint have dried, fill the oil pan with some pebbles and water, and give it a much better life than it would ever normally have. To make sure the water isn't too deep, fill until there is only 1 to 2 inches of water over the top of the pebbles, and consider placing a few branches and twigs inside this piece as well. Oil pans can have walls that are slightly higher than is ideal for birdbaths, so it's worth extending some additional perch options for your feathered visitors. 

Another item you'd normally never look at when considering birdbath DIYs is a lamp. That's probably because you were raised to know that water and electronics fundamentally do not mix. But lots of lamps come with beautiful, ornate bases that could make gorgeous birdbath stands when properly dismantled. Even if you don't have any old light fixtures on hand to repurpose, you can easily thrift a ceramic lamp base, and begin building the cutest birdbath on the block by a country mile. 

Taking the electrical hardware out of a lamp is a lot easier than it sounds, especially since you won't need to be delicate with it. Simply yank out the cord, or snip it as close to the base as possible. You may also need to saw or grind the stem that holds the lightbulb apparatus up at the top. You can accomplish this with an electric Dremel tool, if you've got one on hand. Next, grab whatever you're using as a basin, and affix it to the top of the lamp using a strong epoxy. If the top of the lamp isn't flat enough, or if there's still a hunk of hardware jutting out that you couldn't grind down, simply add a wooden spacer first, and affix the basin to that instead. 

Depending on the weight and construction of your lamp, you may want to weigh it down by drilling a hole in the base and filling it with sand. You can also optionally paint over the lamp, if you aren't able to find one with an already beautiful design. Either way, it only takes a few brief steps to upcycle an old lamp that was destined for the landfill and repurpose it in the garden to stunning visual effect. 

Feathery friends of all species are welcome at the average birdbath, but sometimes you just want to get a better look at one elusive avian. If you're interested in specifically bringing hummingbirds to your yard, here's a birdbath DIY that ought to do the trick. For this iteration, skip the deep basin, and focus on providing flowing water that never gets too high. In fact, you can violate a cardinal rule of birdbaths here (no pun intended) by using a flat surface on the top. The trick is to invest in a flowing pet water fountain, like the kind for cats and dogs, to make your own recirculating birdbath. 

To start, attach a jumbo drinking straw to your water fountain spout. Then, overturn a small plant pot that is the right size to fit snugly on top of the fountain, and run the straw through the hole in the bottom. Clay pots work well because their slightly rough surface offers birds a little extra grip, and they already have a drainage hole. Cut your straw to size so it's poking out just above the top of your Frankensteined water fountain. An 8-inch terracotta plant pot should fit nicely into a pet fountain like this $20 Amazon cat water fountain.

Fill your fountain with water, and watch as it trickles down the exterior of the plant pot and the hummers hopefully start to visit. On very hot days, you can even throw a few ice cubes inside the base of the fountain to provide a cooling bath for birds in summer.