Outdoor Shower Project

We have begun our outdoor shower project and we're looking forward to getting this fully finished and operational!

The first step was the design including choosing finish materials.  That was fairly easy.  I roughly sketched some ideas on how to deal with drainage as well as what dimensions I should make this shower.  (The sketches are rough sketches and not close to being to scale.)

We'll have a small dressing area when you first enter the shower.  The shower area will be adjacent to this dressing area.  In the dressing area, there will be a bench for sitting and hooks for hanging clothing and towels.  

I did some online shopping searching for outdoor shower fixtures but I couldn't find anything that appealed to me so I decided to make my own fixture using black iron pipe, brass valves and a brass showerhead.  I'll write more about this later when I get to this part of the project...

The next step was grading the area.  This took some time.  

While it was raining, I started working indoors on the plumbing that needs to be extended to the back wall of the house so that we'll have water at the outdoor shower.  When it stopped raining, I headed back outdoors to work on grading and drainage...

I carefully arranged some stones we had on hand to use for a pathway.  I still need to level this path and fill it in with top soil between the stones.  The short 4x4 pieces of lumber against the house are strictly for spacing.  The real 4x4's will be around seven feet tall. 

I still need to add some custom flashing to the house and then fill the shower and dressing room area with about another 12 bags of stones.  Then I'll top it with pea gravel...  grade it...  then place down the large patio stones...  then add smooth rock between the patio stones.  

This will be a very nice area when it is finished.  The most time consuming things are the rainy weather that has been significantly delaying any work and running back and forth to Lowes to get more supplies.  Our car can only hold so many heavy bags of stones so we have to make many trips.  This is very time consuming!