Home is Anywhere You Hang Your Garden Hose

I’ll be the first to admit that there is nothing like the satisfied feeling of completing a do-it-yourself project. We had been living here for two years, and I was getting pretty tired of seeing our garden hose curled up on the driveway like a muddy anaconda, so when I saw this DIY Garden Hose Hanger on the boards, I thought I would look into making it. The photo on Pinterest looks like this:

But here’s the thing: I don’t own any proper DIY tools, so in addition to the materials, I would have to buy, at the very least, a saw. I went to the hardware store a few times, and here’s what I found: Leaving out the tools, the materials would be a 2×4 piece of wood (@$5), a spike (@$7), some paint that would coordinate with the exterior of our house (@$9), the metal hanger for the hose ($10) and the cap pieces for the top (@$10). Not to mention the nails and/or caulk to  fashion it all together with. Total price for the DIY project: somewhere between forty and sixty dollars, depending on what options I chose.

The big-box hardware stores can be a little intimidating. Whenever I do anything, even change an irregularly shaped bulb, I invariably get the wrong thing, so that it’s a minimum two-trips to the store. But, I was willing to endure for the sake of the project. I went to get the smaller pieces first, and while I was in the aisle for the hanger, I found a completed metal hanger that was kind of pretty for $30. It’s just metal, and it has three prongs at the bottom that secure it to the ground. So I thought, you know what, that seems a whole lot easier than my DIY project. It was installed twenty minutes later, and it works great. Totally sturdy, and the anaconda situation is totally under control.

The point is, sometimes the shortest distance between two points is just…well, you know.