How to Make a Garden Water Feature.

Hi everybody. Rick Rifle for StylushLife.com with your do-it-yourself project that started with a little bit of trash picking.

So, I was walking the dog a couple of weeks and I stumbled upon this rusty old washtub that somebody had set out on the sidewalk for trash. So the first thing that crossed my mind was, “Maybe this would make a really cool water feature in my backyard.” Now, it presented obvious problems because it was rusty. It and water were not friend. So the first thing that I would do is find a way to make this thing not rust.

I landed on a really thick piece of painter’s plastic. So I cut a big circle on it and I aligned this thing. The problem was that it looked like this kind of membranous science project. I don’t know, it was not attractive. So back to the garage and I’m rooting around for something else and I stumbled upon a vinyl weed barrier which was perfect. It was black, it was porous which meant that I could put it on top of the plastic that I had just cut and water could still get through it and it would give me the desired effect of that nice deep dark fountain.

The next thing that I had to figure out was, “Where am I going to put this water feature?” The most logical place was in my yard here under this tree in the back. There was this old dried rock garden that I made and I was getting kind of tired of it. So I thought, “Let’s clear the rocks out and let’s restructure it. We’ll nestle the fountain up in there and then I’ll take all those rocks and use them to kind of fill the surround. And it was time to bring out the 1999 fountain kit that I found in the box. Now, I was a little dubious at first because when you start to look at the price of individual fountain parts, it adds up pretty quickly. Here was a little package that advertised “Everything you need for $19.99”. I figured Lowe’s has a generous return policy.

I brought it home, cracked it open, assembled it and popped it in. As you can tell from the finished product, it turned out pretty nice. All these for less than $25. I got to tell you, I’m over the loon about it. As a person that loves water features but has never had any experience putting one together, I just kind of flew by the sea with my pants on this one. There are a few logical things that I had to deal with. Is the rusty washtub going to be waterproof? How am I going to make water circulate? Where am I going to get a pump? All of that stuff. It’s just a little bit of clever exploration, and look what I came up with.

With StylushLife.com, I’m Rick Rifle.


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