Rain Barrel Installation Part 1

Our second year of Square Foot Gardening is off to a good start, as is our second year of watering the plants from a rain barrel. Commercial rain barrels are pricey, and I am not wild about buying new plastic items, so we started searching Craigslist for used rain barrels. When we found a listing for new rain barrels made from reclaimed 50-gallon food drums for a mere $35 each, we were sold! Well, we were sold enough to put them on our Christmas list as our number one wish (our families are big on wish lists).

We installed one rain barrel in the back of our house last year. Here’s how it went…

Painting It White
I used exterior primer and paint. It looked good for a couple of minutes before it got its first couple scratches. I should’ve put a clear coat on top. We might just go with the blue when we install the one in the front, especially now that we have a bright blue front door and are working on blue shutters.

Installation
After carefully measuring how high we want the rain barrel, hubby bravely hand-saws through our brand, spanking new downspout.

Time to connect the shortened downspout to the rain barrel.

In Part 2: lessons learned and more pictures.