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Day 295 - Completed the step-up floor in front of the bar. This is where the bar stools will go.
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Day 295 - Tried to complete the inside of the bar, but ran out of daylight. To the right, we'll have an icemaker and refrigerator. At the end we'll have a grill and on the left, a bar and sink. |
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Day 295 - Front of the porch in the pool house needs a few more pieces. Will try to complete all of this tomorrow. I want to spread the fill by this weekend for all of the pool house and firepit area so it's all complete |
Day 295 - A picture with it all cleaned up. Still have stone on the left from the pond stream. |
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Day 295 - At night, it lights up pretty nice!
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Day 295 - Can't wait to get the pond complete so we can use the fire pit. |
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Day 296 - Got a photo in the morning of the entire fire pit area.
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Day 296 - We'll be able to relax out here one day and enjoy the entire view.
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Day 296 - One step closer to Finished!!!
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DaY 298 - Starting to finish the pond stream today.
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Day 298 - In order to re-use the original pond liner in the stream, I wanted to put some protection down, using an old cover and then the new liner and then the old liner so it protects the new liner from rocks, etc.
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Day 298 - Working on the lower stream/pond area today and re-placing the waterfall. Spent a lot of time leveling the waterfall area well to get a good waterfall in a couple of days from now.
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Day 298 - The tarp runs the entire length of the stream.
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Day 298 - It was a full day of moving rocks and replacing rocks.
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Day 298 - It's nice to have the fish in the main pond, but it is getting very green in there.
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Day 298 - View of the top stream. This whole area will be completely removed and re-designed with the horse trough in place filtering the entire pond.
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Day 298 - Placing the new liner on top of the tarp in the lower end of the stream.
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Day 298 - This liner will stretch halfway up the top stream to give a good overlap to prevent any leakages.
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Day 298 - A full view of the placement of the lower stream liner. It will drape over the pond at the bottom.
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Day 298 - I then placed the old liner on top of the new liner for protection from the rock placements. This is a picture of the construction after all the rocks are back in place and the waterfall stones are placed level.
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Day 298 - Completed bottom area.
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Dayu 298 - This is a tricky area. The water always wants to move to the left and right of the stones so I added some rocks below the liner to direct the water to the middle of the waterfall stone.
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Day 298 - The upper pond area will be much deeper than it was originally. We can probabaly place some fish in this area now, but the varmits will thin it out quickly. Just not deep enough to survive the winter. It will house the cattails and other water plants.
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Dayu 298 - The Goodyear Blimb came by to say hello.
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Day 298 - Can't get enough views for future reference.
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Day 298 - And another one.
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Day 298 - I wanted to tackle the watering system for the planted area today. Started with adding crushed red stone around the edges of the pond and the wall.
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Day 298 - Taking out the waterfall skimmer and going to re-do this entire area. Building a Celtik wall on the pool side and keeping stone on the porch side.
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Day 298 - He's just putting along.
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Day 298 - Finally got the waterfall skimmer out. It turns out our leak was probably from the drain from this skimmer. It apparently broke and the pipe from the drain was filled with sediment and very wet. The end didn't appear to be attached to anything. That would conincide well with the timing of the leak in the fall when I was working in this area. I sure hope we solved all of our leak problems. This job needs to simply be DONE!!!
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Day 298 - The rock wall on the porch side is mortared in. Starting from scratch now.
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Day 298 - Digging out the area where the skimmer was. This soil was good top soil, so I decided to wheel barrow it up near the garage where the grass is struggling. Spread the dirt and seeded that lawn area. Two birds with one stone!!!
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Day 298 - Final placement of both horse trough and waterfall skimmer. This will serve as a double filtering system which should do a great job of keeping all the water clean and healthy. Beginning to build the wall base on the left side of the stream.
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Day 298 - In order to get the waterfall skimmer to a level where it feeds from the horse trough, I had to dig down about a foot. Also, the entire system is placed within the pond liner so leaks within each of these filters will not affect the level of the pond. I'm not sure if I'll be able to empty the horse trough of water without adding a few more drain holes around the waterfall skimmer. This was a tricky area. I spent time placing drain stone on the edge of the wall to prevent any plastic anchors from toughing the liner. After several inches of stone, went inside to place stone surrounding both filters and repeated that process all the way up the wall.
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Day 298 - Not sure where he went, but he came back the same way at the end of the day.
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Day 299 - Added all the plumbing inside the horse trough and began moving all the stone back around the trough.
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Day 299 - That picture will be one of my favorites when it's all done.
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Day 299 - A view looking upstream with all the filters in place and the celtik wall close to completion. I think I'll cap off all the entrance to the pond and make it a stepping area to avoid the small tripping potential if the bluestone is only 1" lower than the wall going into the pond.
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Day 299 - About 98% complete with this modification. I think this will really do well with the overall design. It isn't made for handicapped acess though. I'm going to add a double wall cap where the level is located to make a necessary step up into/out of the stream area. This will prevent tripping in this area in the future as I indicated above.
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Day 299 - A view looking downstream. The planting area needs caps and I need to determine where I'm going to add one more step up going toward the driveway in the walking area. We'll fill this entire area in with the crushed redstone. That will be one more pile of stone which will be eliminated from the back yard. It's been there since last Fall. That may be next weeks project. That will be the end of the bluestone walkway until later this summer when funds start loosening up again.
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Day 299 - This area is ready for mulch now. I placed the crushed red stone all around the perimeter and buried the sprinkling system. The stone will prevent runoff going into the pond hopefully. I'm very happy with my progress this week and even time to play a round of golf this morning. Next week is Memorial weekend and I'll have 4 full days of work time.
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