We added a third rain barrel to our collection this week.  It’s a really gorgeous one: a reclaimed oak wine barrel from Barrel Depot.  They offered our neighborhood group a modest discount, so I decided to take them up on it.  Now our two uglier plastic ones will be in the back of the house and the oak one will adorn the front:

I like that this one is made with better components than our plastic ones — the cheap hose attachments on our plastic ones are already falling apart.  The only challenges with it were: 1) it is extremely heavy, 2) we needed to find our own screen for the top, and 3) there was a 2″ hole in the middle which Adam had to cut a piece of oak and plug (visible in picture).

We got lucky on the screen issue.  Right there in the sandbox was an old sieve which just happened to fit the hole perfectly:

Perfect.  Now we just need some rain.