After we closed our gallery downtown six years ago, we brought home several boxes of decorative items that were sitting around the shop, mostly being used as decorative props in displays.
Our little birdhouse... which I am not sure was ever meant to be inhabited
One of those was a little painted birdhouse that we hung up next to our front door just because it looked cute and welcoming. I don't think it was ever intended to actually be a functional home for birds, just a pretty trinket.
Back in the early spring — before there were any leaves on the trees — we noticed that a pair of chickadees were often hanging out in the Japanese maple tree at the front of the house... and occasionally, they'd actually make it up on our front porch next to the front door, checking out the little house.
Hello!
We thought nothing much of it, given that they previously had made their home either in a nesting box that is mounted up under the eaves by the kitchen, or in a different little nesting box that we'd moved away from the house... and maybe they were looking for that.
Evaluating the possibilities
In time, though, it seemed like they were showing a greater degree of interest in the little painted house and one afternoon while working on something else outside 
Somebody's home!
We were rather surprised, since it seemed like a bit of a dodgy place for a bird to have a nest. After all, we were constantly opening and closing the front door and if we weren't closing it very gently it would certainly send vibrations through the wall into the place where the nest box was.
To add to it, we started the spring with a large Japanese Maple at the front of the house in desperate need of being trimmed and cut back so while there was lots of tree coverage when they first started examining the nesting spot, the majority of that tree was soon cut back and removed.
Fetching dry moss to line the nest!
And yet?
Our sweet little tenants persisted and insisted on having their nest there!
Honestly, we were rather worried that we were disturbing them every time we left the house or returned, but they seemed to get used to the fact that they lived in a fairly heavily trafficked area. Aside from that, I believe chickadees are perhaps — along with sparrows — some of the birds best suited to cohabitating with humans.
Home, sweet home!
In time, we noticed that there were little birds coming and going from the nest not with building material, but with insects and worms!
Of course we didn't want to disturb, but there were definitely times when mom or dad would come back with food and we could hear the cheep-cheep-cheeping of tiny birds inside the box!
The little bird family has moved out now, of course, but there was a time when it seemed like we had 5-6 chickadees all clustered around our old apricot tree by the driveway. As best we can tell, the little birds managed to raise 4 babies and we now have a somewhat more significant population of chickadees that often will come and sit very close when we're sitting at the table in the garden... and they settle in the apple trees right above our heads!
The chicadees sometimes sit above us, no more than a few feet away!
While it's definitely adorable that they come so close and that they're so tame around us it's also a little worrisome that these wild birds are as comfortable with humans as they are. But hopefully they will be OK and go on to make babies of their own!
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