Can You Tell...?

..we have some hillbilly ingenuity in us?

Either that or I watched Goonies a lot as a kid?

The pool is set up and now comes the task of procuring more than 6,000 gallons of water to fill it!

It's supposed to rain all day, so we wanted to try and capture some of that rainwater and divert it into the pool.

See? Ladders propping up old gutters left behind in the pole barn.

Some old t-bars weighing down the first gutter, delicately sitting on the frame of the barn, with the sledge hammer actually keeping it from sliding! The gutter sits on top of the greenhouse and the t-bars keep it from sliding off.

That's hillbilly gravity-defying skill at it's best!

Water from the first gutter drips into the second gutter which is sitting atop a log and broken cinder block set into the first rung of the ladder.

 Water flows into the third gutter sitting on another ladder, finally dripping into the pool.

Not a bad set up. Looks crazy, but every drop helps to fill up the pool!

(pardon the mess. pretend you don't see anything but the pool and the hillbilly gutters! thank you.)

We are going to rig up a better gutter system around the pole barn so that all the water will flow into rain barrels, which will then be used for topping off the pool and watering the garden. We were pleased to see there were plenty of old gutters left in the rafters of the pole barn, much more than we originally thought. Looking forward to coming up with a rainwater-catching system using what we have!

*edited to add:

The hillbilly gutters added over 400 gallons of water to the pool! Obviously not enough to fill the pool, but 400 gallons!!  Whoa! 

We had the pool water guy come out and fill it; one trip = 2,000 gallons.

3 trips total for 6,000 gallons and he couldn't even put in the last bit because the gutter system added so much water-- way more than we ever expected!

We are now using the water collected in the rain barrels for topping off the pool and it's all working out great! Not once, have we needed to use the hose!