I do like this thread. Let's keep it going. I think the problem that most of us may have is that what we do on a daily basis is just not worthy of boring the crap out of people that are cool enough to own Corvettes.
Today I worked on getting some rain barrels set up. My uncle Ray was an avid outdoorsman and was into everything to do with nature, so of course he had several rain barrels. I had to disconnect them last fall, and my aunt asked me to get rid of a bunch of them because she wasn't going to use them. Rather than take them to the dump like she asked, I brought four of them home. Today I decided to do something with them before my wife asks me to get rid of them.
I started with a loose plan to build an elevated table so that I can actually get water out of the barrels without using a pump. Gravity works! A trip to Rona and rifling through their scrap bin piles out front found me enough lumber to make a two-tier table. One for the big trough to go on the bottom, and enough room for two garbage pails on top. A few patio stones that I want to get rid of from the back yard and a bit of fill to level it all, and I have a good solid base to start with.
I jimmied it together and found that my cheap boards were a bit twisted, so it isn't as straight as it ought to be even though I measured everything (hence the spacer), but who cares? I stained it (and a bit of my walkway, oops), and roughed in the plumbing to the evestrough just before the rain started. Installed a couple of valves to allow the top can to drain to the bottom, and out to a watering can, and voila! Let it rain!
Four hours later and it has been raining steady, but light. The top can is full, and the bottom is two-thirds. Already! I just added a second can to the top for extra overflow, but broke my other valve output so now I will have two full cans up top and have to figure out a way to replace that (hard to do when it is full of water) in the daylight. I can't believe these things fill up so fast!
Anybody wanna buy some water?
Today I worked on getting some rain barrels set up. My uncle Ray was an avid outdoorsman and was into everything to do with nature, so of course he had several rain barrels. I had to disconnect them last fall, and my aunt asked me to get rid of a bunch of them because she wasn't going to use them. Rather than take them to the dump like she asked, I brought four of them home. Today I decided to do something with them before my wife asks me to get rid of them.
I started with a loose plan to build an elevated table so that I can actually get water out of the barrels without using a pump. Gravity works! A trip to Rona and rifling through their scrap bin piles out front found me enough lumber to make a two-tier table. One for the big trough to go on the bottom, and enough room for two garbage pails on top. A few patio stones that I want to get rid of from the back yard and a bit of fill to level it all, and I have a good solid base to start with.
I jimmied it together and found that my cheap boards were a bit twisted, so it isn't as straight as it ought to be even though I measured everything (hence the spacer), but who cares? I stained it (and a bit of my walkway, oops), and roughed in the plumbing to the evestrough just before the rain started. Installed a couple of valves to allow the top can to drain to the bottom, and out to a watering can, and voila! Let it rain!
Four hours later and it has been raining steady, but light. The top can is full, and the bottom is two-thirds. Already! I just added a second can to the top for extra overflow, but broke my other valve output so now I will have two full cans up top and have to figure out a way to replace that (hard to do when it is full of water) in the daylight. I can't believe these things fill up so fast!
Anybody wanna buy some water?
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