RUMFORD — After spending years selling used license plates at craft fairs across the Northeast, something clicked for Brian Harvey.

The former carpenter from Rumford re-imagined his stacks of unsold plates as building materials. The plates, he figured, are light, durable, malleable and never rust. And despite increasing variety in their art design, passenger vehicle plates are as regular as McDonald’s hamburgers. Every one in America is made of aluminum and is exactly 6 inches by 12 inches.

Ah, uniformity.

“I had my dimensions,” Harvey said. “I went to work.”

The result is a niche business Harvey calls “Bird Has Arrived.” He makes and sells birdhouses crafted from license plates.

“I’ve made 1,400 of these and they’ve sold in all 48 states and five countries,” he said.

And he’s been hard at work getting ready for the warm weather. He starts hitting the fairs in late April and continues traveling until the fall.

“I can’t make enough of them,” he said.

Each one takes about two hours to build, but Harvey’s a little cagey on exactly how it happens.

“Part of what’s on the inside is a secret,” he said.There are 28 to 35 screws. Each house uses five plates, all positioned to best display the artistry of each plate. He hand-cuts a hole on the front, where he attaches a wooden branch.

Mostly, the work happens on Harvey’s porch.

“The neighbors just shake their heads,” he said. “They don’t know what’s going on.”

Most folks catch on when they glimpse his creation. They always seem to.

He sold all of his inventory the first weekend they went on sale in 2001.

“A gentleman came in from NYC and bought seven of them,” he said.

He made more and they went nearly as fast.

Often, people buy them to remember the state they grew up in or visited. Designs, such as the Maine lobster or New Hampshire’s Old Man of the Mountain seem to play a key role, too. And some folks want custom houses that mix and match plates.

It’s the kind of attraction that first led Harvey to begin collecting.

“I was always fascinated with plates,” he said. By 1977, he was selling at the fairs.

Though he has about 8,000 plates on hand — what he calls “a small inventory” — most are for sale. Only a tiny fraction are for his collection of 100 plates. Some are merely whimsical, like a pink fish on a Tennessee specialty plate, or rare like a leather 1914 Massachusetts plate.

That one, a number one plate for which he paid “four figures,” is kept in a bank vault with a few other gems.

“I can’t keep them in the house,” Harvey said. “If the house burns down, you lose the history.”

His favorites are the low number plates. Of course, the plate on his van has Maine’s highest number, “1000000.”

None of those specialties make it onto his birdhouses or other creations. Harvey has begun selling decorative stars made out of old plates and he is working on a few other ideas.

“I’ve got 100 ideas written down,” he said. “I don’t want to talk about them yet and I’ll never live to make them all.”

dhartill@sunjournal.com

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