Rain barrel #1: DONE!

My father was kind enough to donate his old water softener tank to me for conversion into a rain barrel. Since the thing held rock salt and water for the last 10 years in his basement and it still looks like new, I figure I should be able to get a few good rain barrel years out of it! It has taken me a while to finally get everything I need to convert it, but at long last I'm finally done. I just finished about 15 minutes ago, so it's too dark out to photograph, but I will take some good ones tomorrow.

Steve and I also drove to Imlay City and bought a few 58 gallon pickle barrels to convert. Since I had the baby, we could only fit 4 barrels in the van, which means that without the baby we could easily get 8 in there.

The basics of these barrels are these:

58 gallon pickle barrel (or any food grade barrel that has never held chemicals) with (2) 3/4" holes. Bore one hole near the top and one close to the bottom. We are using 1/2" brass faucets and 3/4" - 1/2" threaded hose adapters for the tap and overflow on the barrel. The final piece is the lid. Since the downspout has to run into the top of the barrel to fill it and you don't want debris or bugs to get in, you have to both cut a hole in the lid and seal that hole with screen to keep out the bad stuff. I chose to drill a gridwork of holes in the top of this particular barrel and then place a piece of screen beneath to seal out unwanted pests. The nice part about the softener tank is that the lid doesn't screw on, but it still makes a very nice tight connection. The barrels we bought have screw down lids, making it slightly difficult to open them without anything in them.

I'm very excited to get the other two completed and then I've got to alter the downspouts on my house and install some new gutter for the barrel by the garden. That is going to be the hard part. Mostly because I've only ever once hung a gutter. But that is what this blog is all about, right? Me figuring out how to do this homeowner stuff one project at a time.