Bandwidth limitations and energy constraints set severe restrictions on the design of control systems that utilize wireless sensor and actuator networks. It is common in these systems that a sensor node needs not be continuously monitored, but communicates to the controller only at certain instances when it detects a disturbance event. In this paper, such a scenario is studied and particular emphasis is on efficient utilization of the shared communication resources. Encoder-decoder design for an event-based control system with the plant affected by pulse disturbances is considered. A new iterative procedure is proposed which can jointly optimize encoder-decoder pairs for a certainty equivalent controller. The goal is to minimize a design criterion, in particular, a linear quadratic cost over a finite horizon. The algorithm leads to a feasible design of time-varying non-uniform encoder-decoder pairs. Numerical results demonstrate significant improvements in performance compared to a system using uniform quantization.