Community Editor

If you're sorting through some rubbish - perhaps things you've had in your attic for years, good stuff, but it needs to go - don't be surprised if a tall, slender blonde woman approaches you and asks for some of it.

It's all right - Carole Campbell just wants materials for the birdhouses that she makes - and if you let her, she'll salvage some materials for future construction.

“I'm very outspoken,” said Campbell, a former business manager and present co-owner, along with her husband Bill Campbell, of Bay Area Appliance & TV, in downtown Coos Bay. “I'll walk up and say, ‘If you're taking that to the dump, I'll take it off your hands.”

Campbell builds birdhouses, something she took up shortly after retiring from the paperwork jungle of accounting and found herself with time on her hands.

“Friends of mine in Idaho built birdhouses,” said Campbell. “They said, ‘You'll be bored stiff - you're used to working eight to 10 hours a day.'

“So I fussed around with it and enjoyed it. I made some for my kids and they said, ‘Hey mom, why don't you sell them?”

So she did. But first this former businesswoman had to learn a little about carpentry and build up a tool kit.

“I knew how to drive a nail and I had a jigsaw,” recalled Campbell. “Now I've ended up with a battery-operated screwdriver, a compound miter saw and a table saw.”

Campbell's birdhouses come in many shapes, sizes and decor - the universal is that all are made from distressed materials - old wood and rough paint, as well as antique fixtures, such as door knobs, handles, latches and other old hardware. It's almost all found materials.

“I'll go to the beach,” said Campbell. “Or find some people tearing down a house, or old shingles from a roof being taken down.

“The only new wood I use is for the Oregon State University and Go Ducks birdhouses.”

Her birdhouses are marvelously varied, with old boots (both cowboy and rubber), fish net, horseshoes, nozzles, fishing gear, antlers, and even old kerosene and gasoline cans integrated into her designs - designs that Campbell say are pure inspiration.

“They just come to me,” she said with a smile. “I have no idea what they are going to look like when I start. I just do whatever looks and feels right.”

Campbell says that the birds that move in to her creations seem to be “mostly swallows and wrens, the small birds.”

She is prolific, turning out almost a birdhouse a day at times.

“I'll make 30 to 35 a month,” she said. Which means that over the last 10 years she has built, and sold, more than 4,000 birdhouses.

“I love them,” said Linda Edwards, of Allegany who has seven of Campbell's birdhouses gracing her gardens. “We kind of think on the same lines. I enjoy all the little found items she puts on them and her imagination.

“They're just wonderful.”

“I take orders,” Campbell said. “As long as they are not specific. They can give me a topic, and then I'll make it one-of-a-kind.”

Then the former accountant and business manager smiled. “I should have been a carpenter,” she said.