Over the past week or so we have been working on our backyard. Our main goal is to replace the horrid overgrowth with 2 ponds, 2 waterfalls, a stream and a patio along with much needed deck repair and touchup. Meanwhile the house is being sided and the garage door needs to be installed (pictures to follow when all is complete). So as you can tell, the front and back of the house are undergoing a much needed renovation!
So, with all that said, we have completed the ponds, waterfalls, and stream!!!! Yeah!!!! I want you to know this was a HUGE project! As one of my kids said, after being asked to commit an hour to the project and then working 2 full days, “You guys said one hour, not HOURS!” Really though, every single person in our family had a job and they did it VERY WELL.
Backyard “before”…really this picture does not do justice to how awfully overgrown the backyard was. Thankfully Sydney took this randomly one day as I forgot to take backyard “before” pictures.
Excavating the area. Please disregard the house as it will hopefully be completely sided by fall. Prior to the excavation there was a large tree completely covering the second window from the left (the office). There was also a concrete walkway going from the deck to the second window from the left which USED to be a service door to the old garage. This entire area had old shrubs, weeds, large flagstones, and plenty of poison ivy!
More excavating…
Busting up the concrete walkway…believe it or not, I actually took a few swings!
Lots of huge roots to dig out….very thankful for the tractor to pull on the heavy stuff and dig a lot of the patio area.
Digging out the lower pond…4 ft deep.
Still digging…
Below the two dining room windows used to be a flower bed. Every child grabbed a shovel and dug that entire bed out so that we could line it and fill it with water as our “upper pond”.
We then used the dirt from that flower bed to build up the stream on the right to flow down into the lower pond.
Saturday morning, with the area all prepped, our intentions were to start early. Rain put a stop to that. Luckily the rain stopped by 10, but this meant water in our lower pond. After pumping out the majority of the water we had to shop-vac out the rest in order to line the pond.
We used carpet pad to pad the pond and stream areas.
Lining the stream with carpet pad and sand.
Completed lower pond before the liner.
Lining the stream.
Upper pond and stream lined.
Lower pond lined and first of the rocks have been laid…that liner was EXTREMELY heavy! It was all the 5 of us (Joe, me, and 3 kids) could do to get it into the pond.
As you can see everyone had a job…Jackson was laying stones in the stream, London was holding the liner in place:)
Laying stones in this pond was very tedious. After hours of stacking only to see your masterpiece tumble down, we resorted to marine GOOP to glue the rocks together!
Yes, every single one of those rocks was laid by hand, stacked with precision. My patience wore thin, so Joe took this task on with renewed energy, and a wiser building plan, in order to complete the entire lower pond. We laid approximately 8 tons of rocks and boulders total.
We added some color using various plants. Any black liner you see will be covered by completion of the project, whether by siding, stone, or patio blocks. Almost all of the stream stones were laid by Sydney and Holland. If you weren’t laying stones you were filling 5 gallon buckets with them….a job even a 2 year old can do.
Had to throw this picture in there….wearing her brothers’ boots!
Project complete…turning on the water and watching it all come together!
Both falls work and sound beautiful! Much tweaking to be done as we “tune” the waterfalls to get the desired effect (the yellow hose is NOT part of the finished project:) Just used to fill the upper pond).
The completed lower pond, still filling. The water is muddy because we didn’t rinse the stones before we laid them. We will pump this water out and refill with clean water after we feel the rocks have been rinsed thoroughly.
Watch for more pictures as we intend to now begin our patio project and have it completed within the next 2 weeks!!!!
I am so proud of each of my kids. This was a long and tedious job that truly without them could not have been done so quickly. We brought out a CD player and listened to books on tape (The Secret Garden – twice, and Anne of Green Gables:)) which made the work more enjoyable. They all stuck to their tasks and worked until the project was completed.
Definitely a job well done!
