Pond Construction

Somehow during the spring of '95 I felt compelled to do some real digging and building, as opposed to digging up bugs and building vaporware. The house and garden offered plenty of opportunities for such entertainment and I had to decide on where to start with remodeling.

We had been bothered by the noise from the road passing in front of the house while sitting in our covered porch for a while, so fixing that seemed like a good idea. We decided to build a solid fence to screen the porch from the cars and to place a retaining wall extending the down-hill wall of the house to the property line. This would form a level "patio" around the porch which we wanted to landscape in a japanese style.

I started drawing plans, buying wood, and then digging. During some evening, after a sweaty day digging, sawing and hammering, we looked into one too many gardening books and got bitten by the pond bug. The perspective of having a nice surface of water with beautiful water plants right there in front of our porch sounded just too wonderful. It then occurred to me that I could relatively easily adapt the construction to create a pond: I only needed to dig a bit deeper, or so I thought.

Well, it turned out to be a little more involved than that! First I had to reinforce the whole construction a bit to make sure it would not yield under the weight of the water. And then the whole process of lining the pond took a lot more time than filling the hole behind the retaining wall with dirt would have.

I had the wise idea to take a couple of pictures during the constrution which I'm making available here. You might wonder why I do this. Well, very simply because I found Pete's Pond Page very inspiring and helpful while planning the construction of my own pond. So I hope that others get inspired seeing my pond and find it helpful to see how someone else did things.

Construction phases

Lat modified Wednesday, November 04, 1998, Thorsten von Eicken