Wednesday, May 30, 2012

Teo’s 2012 Pond Construction 



The shovel finally hit the dirt Mother’s day weekend for the start of our new pond build. My wife and I have been planning this for some time now after moving into our new home 5 months ago.
The plan is to build up a formal cement block pond with a drop in liner. Inside dimensions of the pond portion will be approximately 11’ by 11’ with a flat bottom depth around 7’ and a centered 4” BD feeding a Cetus Sieve. Included in the plans are 4 TPR’s, 2 mid water pickups along with a modified Waterway wide mouth skimmer to aid in circulation and filtration.
Attached are some pictures of the excavation project. It’s great to have brother who is an experienced heavy equipment operator, this probably felt like a toy in the sand box compared to his day job.

                       

Here is a picture of our nicly ladscaped yard before the project began.









Made some more progress on the pond over the last week was able to get the forms in and rebar installed in them thanks to my dad’s help. This step seemed to be very time consuming but we wanted to get it right. Saturday we bent up a couple 100 feet of rebar that we placed in the middle of them.





 
 
Monday we had 12 pallets worth of materials delivered to our driveway. 550 Cement Blocks, 240 Bags of Concrete mix and 1000’ of rebar. Now it’s just hiking it all to the back yard so we can get the cars in the garage again.
 
 
 
Got 40+ bags of concrete mixed last night and poured in the forms. I added over 75 18” sticks of rebar into the footing hopefully my measurements come out correctly and some of them hit the holes in the blocks. Thinking that rebar was just a cheap soft metal I figured my Sawzall would cut through them like butter. Not the case I should have bought or borrowed a metal chop saw. Probably could have paid for one with the number of blades I went through cutting all those sticks. Overall the project went well with my dad and brothers help.