Make It Monday

Awhile back I saw this fire hydrant planter on Pinterest and thought, 'I think I can make that'.

via Pinterest

As a certified hoarder, of course I have a stockpile of empty coffee cans, which I thought would make a good base for this project.

J tried to drill the holes for the (sticking out parts) of the hydrant, but as I'd thought, we first needed to fill them with water and freeze them, so he had something solid to drill into without collapsing the side(s) of the can.

After drilling the holes and melting the ice, we used a PVC "T" inside the can to anchor the three (sticking out parts) on the sides and front. We didn't use any pipe glue, they just stuck together good enough.

For the covers and front of the (sticking out parts) I used the lids from the Prize containers from bubblegum machines. (Which used to be 25¢, but are now 50¢ or 75¢ each.)  I just hot glued them on to the ends of the PVC pipe.

The front cover of the hydrant in the original picture is different from the sides, but I never could think of anything that looked like that to use, so for the prototype we just used the same thing and maybe I'll figure something else out eventually. But I'm not too concerned about it because I think it turned out fine using the Prize container lid same as the sides.

 For the base, J traced around one of my kitchen bowls and cut a circle out of some scrap plywood with his jigsaw.

I hot glued the can to the wooden circle, then Ryan hot glued on the Nuts.  The hot gluing didn't work very well, maybe because it was a breezy day and it kept drying too quickly, I'm not sure. Ryan glued and glued and re-glued before he was able to get the Nuts to stick to the wooden circle base. J ended up running a screw up through the bottom to secure the base to the can.

Then they hung it up and spray painted it bright red.

J gave it another coat of paint this morning, and said he thought it needed another coat, then we'll spray with it clear sealer.

I was too excited to be able to wait for all that to happen to show it off, lol.  Later I'll post a pic with it with a plant in it.