Koi Pond - A new beginning Part One

I want to share with you the making of our new koi pond. It is a work in progress right now and it consumed several days out of our "stay-cation" last week, haha! Up until my hubby hurt his neck and sadly, it sits... patiently waiting. So here it goes!

so here's our old pond, kinda looking tired and sad after years of neglect.

view from other side - still same old pond only being emptied

 So, we discovered a month or so ago that our pond was losing water. After figuring out the tears in the liner were pretty down low, I had the fantastic idea to move the pond out from under our deck (where it shouldn't have been in the first place!) so we could see it from our deck and I could finally grow some glorious lotus (hopefully) and other pond plants.

just a short jaunt to the left - our new location for the pond

rough layout for the new pond - I was going for an organic shape

I laid it out with a trusty garden hose and went up on the deck to check it out. Looks good to me!

Breaking ground

Having a backhoe it a definite plus on the digging part.

almost done digging mechanically

 It didn't take long to get all we could get with the backhoe. Next was the hand digging and leveling. Yes, I jumped in there and slung dirt too. I've probably got liver damage from all the Ibprofren I've taken... haha

So I don't have many pictures of it in between here as we cut, glued and laid down our liner then schlepped it to the hole, because hubby was not too keen on me stopping to grab my camera every 30 minutes, plus it was 96 degrees (F) and I had sweat rolling down the crack and everywhere else you don't want it... ew. You wouldn't believe how heavy that stinkin' thing is. I think I ruptured my spleen heaving it up on the wagon.

Asher wore out

We even had broken child labor laws I'm sure by having Asher help shovel loads of sand. He is a little sand shovelin' machine! But he loved to feel important by helping and he really did do us a favor by staying in the back of the truck and shovel sand into buckets for us to level the liner. We worked until about 10:30 that night.

not too wore out to do tricks for the camera

happy fish

While we emptied the old pond, we had to keep the fish in a holding tank - an old pre-formed pond I had from a long time ago so they were really happy to discover this ocean of a new pond. The reason we had to remove them was because we put the dirt in the old hole.

curiosity killed the...

Here's Lightning checking out the fish wondering if they are supper. haha

All one day's hard work

Hubby and Asher admiring the work we had done, and watching Lightning

view from deck

The next morning I got this picture and was happy to see the fish happily swimming along. We have 5 fish, 2 are blackish bronze and may never be seen again!

go the pole in for the electric box

This was part of the boring part, but needed. Installing the electric. Luckily hubby is multi-talented. See the little orange koi showing off for the camera?

adding electric box for pump

Another scorcher and to add insult to injury there are these nasty little knats that fly up your nose in your ears and buzz all around you that literally drive you mad. Skin So Soft to the rescue. Too bad it breaks me out, but sacrifces... ya know? Plus it made hubby smell better ;)  remember... still 96 degrees F.

playing in the bubbles as we add more water

The white and black koi fish is our largest. I think it's a she, we've had babies but not in the previous pond. Hopefully we'll get more babies as I get plants and the pond matures. Not sure where the time went and what we did in between these pics but before I knew it, we were building the first waterfall and it was dark. Yes, those rocks are heavy!

waterfall #1 made of Kentucky flagstone (limestone? sandstone?

close up - ahhh if you could only hear it.

Really, if you could hear it... heaven. Trickle, trickle and the bull frogs singing to each other. So relaxing. We are going to add more of the same rock all around the perimeter of the pond. I hope I have enough. Rock is really expensive! We don't have this kind around us or on our property to dig up, too bad.

We actually have another waterfall built but I haven't taken pictures of it yet. I'll post them soon. Hubby's vacation is over now (good thing, he was working me like a dog), so back to our normal schedule but stay tuned for more as the koi pond slowly progresses!