How much water does one inch of rainfall on 1,000 square feet of roof make?  About 6,000 gallons.

How much water does it take to feed our garden?  No clue.  But I bet it’s not 6,000 gallons.  I’m hoping it’s more like 110.

I have a weird hobby.  I admit this.  I like to find things I need/want that are too expensive and try to make them myself.  I’ve knocked off $200 bookshelves from Pottery Barn, a $3000 painting I saw in a North Carolina gallery, a coffee table we saw in an episode of Frasier years ago…it’s a sickness really.  I’m that guy who walks through stores muttering to himself, “I could totally do that.” Of course it doesn’t always work – I have a small collection of failures in the attic somewhere that I swear I’ll pull out and get right someday.

All this to say I was pricing rain barrels last week and I discovered that they would cost me $190-2000 dollars, depending on how fancy I wanted them to be.  So, my sickness kicked in, I pushed away from my computer and muttered to myself, “I could totally do that.”

I bought a couple of barrels for $12 from Nashville Barrel & Drum last week.  They used to hold 55 gallons of macadamia nut oil. Then I paid Lowe’s a visit and went to work.

I had a hard time finding directions on-line for how to build a rain barrel so, for any other sick people out there in need, here’s how I did it.

I sawed through our downspout and redirected the water down to one of the barrels using a piece of flex tubing.

The tubing takes the water through this black thingy – I truly don’t know what it’s called or what it was made for but it’s flexible rubber, you find it in the plumbing department and it’s the perfect size for that flex tube.

I cut some “gutter guard” into a circle and glued it into that rubber thingy using some Gorilla Glue (the modern man’s duct tape) – this’ll keep all the debris from the roof from getting carried into the barrel.

I drilled a hole in the barrel near the bottom, shoved a spigot in there, and Gorilla Glued it in place too.

When the first barrel fills up it’ll spillover into the second barrel through this little tube I bought in the plumbing department too, where you can buy hoses by the foot.  I just drilled a hole in each barrel, used a small piece of hose and something called a “double male hose barb” (sounds like a character in a sideshow) to connect the two holes and – BAM! – overflow.

In theory, when it rains, I’ll collect 110 gallons of those thousands that hit my roof and use them to water the garden.  And it only cost me about $50.  If only I could figure out how to build an iPhone and an SUV and a flat screen and a…