DIY OutDoor Shower... On the Cheap!!!

I can't believe summer has basically come and gone. It was a blast traveling around to see some extended family. Now we are back into the full swing of school. Yet, for us around here in southern California, it's a great time to hit the beach. So I finally decided we needed to do something about all the sand that seems to follow us home. I would really have liked to build a proper outdoor shower but since we are renting this place I decided to build something that I don't mind throwing out later. I guess I could take it apart since it is basically three pallets but time will tell. The other main criteria was that this shower, or glorified foot wash, had to be as cheap as possibly. Naturally this meant finding some pallets that I could re-purpose. As you can see from the pictures I found 4 pallets and used a bunch of left over scrap wood I had sitting around from the DIY Cornhole boards project and other projects. So here is what I used:
- 4 wood pallets I picked up from a local nursery.
- lots of screws and nails
- a 20 foot hose
- Garden sprayer with adjustable nozzle and lock
- A screw-in hook to store the hose
- A quick disconnect valve to hook up the hose to the wash basin in my garage

That's right, I decided to just hoot right up to the wash basin in my garage rather than deal with a whole bunch of plumbing to get hot and cold water outside. We are typically wrangling the kids together to wash them off so it's easy enough to have one spraying them off and the other adjusting the temperature. I engineered a sprayer holder assembly out of left over 2x4's in case we actually wanted to go hands free and wash the sand out of our hair. Yes, sometimes we do body surf and end up getting washed out on the shore with tons of sand, hahahaha.  Anyways, have a look at the photos and then read on for how I assembled the whole thing.

I took one of the pallets apart and ripped down the slates to fill in the spaces on the floor of the shower. That bottom pallet is unchanged other than I did sand it down a little and put a thin coat of lacquer, only because I had just a little left over. I think this shower is basically a little of everything :-)

The long front piece with the hose and sprayer attached to it is a pallet that I'm not really sure what it was built for, but I liked how long it was so I added some lumber to it to make it a bit stronger. I tied in another pallet to also had strength and provide a little back wall so the kids would be contained. I added the little half wall mainly for decoration but also thought the kids could use it as a handle. We do have a bucket we put the kids in to shower them off and to help reclaim the water so we can put it in the flower bed or elsewhere in the yard. Everything is basically nailed or screwed together and it's pretty sturdy considering what it's made from. If I was going to build a true outdoor shower, and I hope to in our new house, I have plans on making it bigger, with proper intake and discharge plumbing to reclaim the water. It will also be a walk in shower because I still plain to use pallets, but I want it to have privacy and be big enough to hang towels without them getting soaked. It will probably be a few months, or years, before I actually get to that project but when I do it will be awesome. Thanks for stopping by to read about this cheap (Less than $30) shower and if you have any questions leave a comment or hit me up on Twitter.