Hello my friends! Today is the first Wednesday of July. Which means that today is the DIY Challenge. This month’s theme is Summer. Which is right up my alley ’cause summer is my favorite time of year! Today I’ll be sharing how to make a garden hose guide.

However, before I share that, I want to thank our hostess, Terrie from Decorate and More With Tip. Terrie is one of the sweetest, most talented gals I know, so if you haven’t visited her go there NOW! You can thank me later.

Also, if you are coming here from Jodi’s, The House House, welcome. I’m so glad that you stopped by. I always love to meet new friends.

We’ve been hand watering the flower beds since the pool dig started.

I gotta tell you that watering the flower beds and the flower pots on our wrap around front porch became quite the event.

Clearly it was time for some garden hose guides before I killed a few plants.

I went to order a few and quickly became discouraged, as all of the cute hose guides were quite pricey!

After doing a little research on making some of my own, I remembered that we had some left over finials from the new fence.

Add the finials to a copper pipe and Ta- daaaa !- new garden hose guides were born.

After picking up a copper pipe from the big box store, The Hubs was kind enough to cut me 18″ pieces of the copper pipe using a jigsaw.

Once he had them cut out, he used a rasp to sand down the rough ends of the pipe.

Now, it was my turn.

The left over finials were black.

Honestly, I almost left them that color and called it good.

However, I loved the look of the copper so much that I wanted the finials to be the same color.

I lightly sanded the finials, then gave them a few coats of Martha Stewarts Copper metallic paint.

After the paint dried, it was time to glue the finials to the pipe.

I used E6000 glue along with the double sided foam tape.

Because my finial was a little larger than my pipe, I wrapped some double sided foam tape around it.

Then liberally coated the tape with E6000 glue and inserted the pipe into the finial.

After letting the glue completely dry, I lightly sanded the finial to give it a worn and slightly distressed look.

The last step was to put a protective coating on the finals.

And my garden hose guide was done!

I have to say that I love the warm color of copper in the garden.

However, if you aren’t a copper fan you could use plain pipe and top it with just about anything.

Door knobs, drawer pulls and curtain rod finiasl are just a few that come to mind.

Now if you will please join me in visiting Pamela at DIY VIBES.

I can’t wait to see what she – and all of the other talented bloggers – is doing this summer!