Birdcage Post Box

Until I started planning our wedding, I had never heard of wedding postboxes or card boxes. To be honest, I'd never really thought about where the cards would end up - surely they would just be with the gifts somewhere?

However, the wonderful world of internet weddings introduced me to the idea of having a postbox to keep any envelopes safe and in one place. It makes sense I suppose, but I'm not sure we really need one. I think it might be another one of those projects that is completely unecessary.

Check out some of these gorgeous card boxes:

do-it-yourself-weddings.com

weddingbee.com

Gorgeous, but they look like quite alot of effort for something I'm not sure we really need. I really like these though:

Mini versiona of classic british post boxes! How cute are they? But at £60 to hire, I definitely don't need one.

Another cute trend seems to be using vintage birdcages to hold the cards:

This works quite well if you're having a vintage theme and is much less effort than making a beautifully decorated one yourself.

Now, it just so happens that we have an old metal birdcage in our garden. My brother is a landscape gardener and one of his customers was getting rid of the birdacge, so he brought it home. It has been sat in our garden in the wind and rain for months, so it's in pretty bad condition at the moment.

bottom of the cage

You can see in this picture that it's covered in generally nastiness and in need of a good clean. So clean it I did! I used white wine vinegar (because I read somewhere that it's really good for cleaning rusty metal) and an old toothbrush, and it come up quite well!

It's still a little bit discoloured in places where the metal is particularly weather beaten, so I decided to paint it white. I found some old tins of white paint in the shed, one of which was for wood and metal. A tip for anyone painting a cage - do the inside first! I did the outside, and then it was a right pain trying to get to the inside bits.

 

I think it looks pretty good! It might need another coat, just to make sure all the black is covered, but I'm pleased with the end result.

The door on the front of the cage will probably be too small for cards so I was thinking that we could leave the top bit open enough for cards to be posted through. I might accessorise it with some purple and green ribbon, I've not quite decided yet.

I really like it, and I love the fact that it was free and didn't take much effort at all. And if we decide that we don't need it for cards after all, it will look lovely just as decoration!