Pond--second attempt--Success!
For those of you who haven't been following our progress so far, look here. We prevailed on our ever-so-helpful neighbor to come over and play with tractors a couple more times, first with his small tractor to fill in the old hole, then again with the big one to put in a new one. The process was very similar, so just picture all those last photos a little further over. :^) After cleanup with a shovel, we ended up with this:
We had Chris pile all the dirt to one side when he made the hole, then reshaped the pile to use it for a fountain and falls. We got the filter and liners from a local pond store. The smaller one here is where the falls will go, which will overlap the larger one in the main pond.
Our hired help was contemplating a similar project, so stopped frequently to document the process.
Here's the main liner going in. Once we had it positioned to our satisfaction, we held it in place with rocks. One of the issues you can run into is pinching the liner between rocks and causing a hole, so it is often recommended that there be a layer of sand under it. Fortunately, our back yard is all sand, so there were no worries there.
Then we used up the rest of our rocks around the edges until it looked nice. Dad used an observation about rocks in nature to fill in with the smaller stones: Nature doesn't care if they fit nice--she just lets them fall where they may, so Dad just tossed the rocks and pebbles roughly where he wanted them after we had fitted rocks in the bigger holes. And he's right, it looks natural.
We were wondering what we would do to fill it, whether we'd need to call a pool company or what, since our well water is very hard and would require a lot of chemistry to get it to behave (iron causes algae blooms, apparently). Fortune again smiled on us--a solid week of rain later that summer took care of it.
As you can see, we finally got those fence panels up that you saw stacked in some of the earlier shots, too. The electric wasn't put in until later in fall. Thanksgiving morning brought with it some weather...
