The story of the rain barrel

Because, let's face it, everything sounds better as a story, right?

There once was a big blue barrel that was given to a deserving family for free by a most generous relative.

(Translation:  Brian's cousin got tired of me bitching about not having a rain barrel and got me one for free - Score!)

Anyway - it was PERFECT.

Except, it was BLUE.

So I painted it. And now it's grey.

Unfortunately, all of the downspouts out front are at the ends of the house - nowhere near where I needed the rain barrel.

So, Brian had to connect to the middle of the gutter.   Here are the tools we used:

And here he is cutting a hole with the saw. 

And here's the resulting broken saw blade. 

So, he cut the rest of it with the tin snips.

Finally, after much cursing and calling of names, we had a hole.

 And now we needed to make the connection from the gutter hole to the barrel.

Here she is right before installation :)

 One thing I needed to remedy was covering up the hole with material so that we didn't have a mosquito paradise, but the water could still flow into the barrel freely.

 

I went down to mom and dad's and grabbed some landscaping material, cut it to size and placed it over the top of the open barrel and put the lid back on.

What. A. Mess.

SIDE NOTE! Thinking about painting the porch ceiling haint blue - thoughts?

Anyway, while I solved the problem of how to make sure mosquito's didn't move in to my barrel, Brian installed the gutter connection.

And in the process, lost about 40 of these^^^^^

In here ^^^^^^^

Much cursing ensued. 

But finally it was done.

And put on blocks.

The hose was attached and we were good to go. 

We moved some of the plants to provide some cover for the barrel and I'm happy to report it really isn't very noticeable and you can't see it at all from the front.

See?

No. You don't.

(Psst, it's behind the tree on the right hand side)