How to Make Recycled Tire Shingles

Thanks to the partnership I have with Discount Tire on this post, I am sharing my recycled tire DIY project for holiday gift inspiration.

Do you ever drive around town on garbage or recycle day and see things that people have set out on their curb and think to yourself, “Man, there is still a lot of life in that.  If only someone would paint it or repurpose it, it could be amazing.”

I do it all the time.  Enough that I often spend my entire drive back and forth to the kid’s school or the grocery store just thinking about how that one item could be repurposed.

When Discount Tire reached out to me for a fresh take on how to repurpose a used tire, the gears started turning.  This is a project that I honestly never would have thought of had I not been asked to think outside the box.  One that stretched my creativity and taught me a valuable lesson at the same time.  It is a birdhouse with recycled tire shingles!

Yes, ones that I cut myself.

From a tire!

With just a kitchen knife!

I’m going to be honest here…this project overwhelmed me when I started it.  The thought of taking a used tire and cutting it apart seemed like it might possibly be one of my worst ideas.

And then I just started.

Once I got over the initial nervousness, I figured out how fun it was and was ready to keep going.  So let me show you how I made my tire shingles.

Using an old kitchen steak knife (this one has been in my junk drawer for so many years that I couldn’t even tell you where it came from), I punctured the sidewall by carefully pushing the knife to the hilt.  It cut surprisingly easy, and I cut the entire sidewall off of the tire.

Because I needed mostly flat pieces to serve as shingles, I then cut the sidewall piece in half.  By stepping on the areas that I was not cutting and keeping pressure on it, it also cut quite easily.

Using the innermost piece of the sidewall, I began to cut smaller sections for the shingles.  I found that the easiest way to do this was to score or mark where I wanted the cut to be and then work downward at a slight angle.  This required a bit more elbow grease than the other cuts, but was still totally manageable with the kitchen knife.

I found a cute little birdhouse at the craft store that I added a bit of paint to.  Then using a mixture of hot glue and superglue, I attached the shingles to the roof.  I did a dry fit first to make sure that it would all fit together the way that I was envisioning.  Because the tire pieces are not perfectly flat, I found that they needed a bit more glue than what I would normally add.

I will admit that this project involved a fair amount of elbow grease, but it was so fun to create something so far outside of the box and reminded me that there are tons of ways to reuse and repurpose all kinds of items.

So the next time that you are in need of a new set of tires, don’t just send your old set straight to the landfill.  Think of a fun new way to use them!