I'M BUILDING A POND!! (So i can swim with my aquarium fish) part 1

Over the past few years there hasn't been a whole lot that I haven't built or did myself. Built every sized aquarium out of every material, every dimension. Built countless types of filters and equipment and it gets to the point where there's not a whole lot left that I haven't built and building the same thing over and over again kind of gets monotonous and boring so it hasn't been incredibly too exciting to do that. Then I thought, well, there is one thing I haven't built just yet. We gotta go outside for this one. That's the gallery. This is my house. I don't live in a mansion. I don't have one of those fancy lives like a lot of YouTubers with a million plus subscribers. Very basic. Very humble. But it is my home. And I love it. The reason we're looking at it is because I just recently built this deck. And I was sitting on it thinking, wouldn't it be nice to build maybe like another little dock that jumps out into a pond that you can swim in with koi. I gotta admit, when I was out at Camp Kennan's it was incredibly inspiring and hands down that was definitely what's inspired this pond and what I'm about to do next. Mind you, a lot of the time some things just don't happen. Sometimes I just brainstorm with you guys. So I want to show you how serious I am. I'm going to build it today. Today or tomorrow. It's getting late and it just finished raining so I think today I just want to let you guys know what the plans are. I've already ordered the pond liner. I'm going to show you exactly what I'm going to do. We might even market out so we can really get some stuff done. But yeah, so it's going to be like a leisure pond. A pond you can actually swim in. And especially with the national pool shortage, this is going to be absolutely incredible to have and look forward to in the years to come. We're going to market out. Where's my measuring tape? Let's talk about the dimensions of the pond first. Again, it's going to go right here. I'm going to move that fire pit out of the way. Don't worry about that. The pond is going to start maybe four feet out. Oh, and this deck is 16 feet by 8 feet. Well, closer to 9 feet. The pond, because I'm in Canada, I need to get below the frost line which is 4 feet in Nova Scotia. I need the pond to be around 5 feet deep. I also don't want to do any crazy shapes or anything like that. I'm just going to do a rectangular deep koi pond, like a classic koi pond that you can actually get into. It's going to be 16 feet long, so as long as that, which doesn't look that long from the camera. But it'll be 16 feet this way and 10 feet this way, 5 feet deep, holding 6,000 gallons. I also need to build the filtration for 6,000 gallons and off the top of my head, I'm thinking I already have a few ideas of things I want to use and do. For example, I have a bunch of these 55-gallon barrels. I can easily build a nice filter out of three or four of these. As for media, guess what? I already have all the biological media. I literally have 55 gallons of it. This is a smaller plastic media that you'll find in the canister filters that I used for the 700 and the 2,000. I've got a bunch of that and then below it is a bunch of K3 coldness media, so that's a fluidized media, a fluidized reactor. I might just mix them both up, I don't know what I'm going to do. Okay, so I'm going to, oh, if you haven't got my new merch yet, go ahead and pick it up. You guys make this type of stuff entirely possible. Anyways, I'm thinking the deck or the platform that's going to walk out to it should be about four feet and I want about a one-foot overhang, so the pond should be three feet. No, we can't go here. You guys don't remember. I already had an excavator back here and I dug the drain for the gallery. It goes right under there and I dug it six feet down and it came across here and then went into the side of the house where the water supply is. I can't go near this. I'm going to need to be at least probably three feet from that. Yeah, three feet from that, so three feet out. I might have to take it six feet out this way, which is fine. Yeah, I guess I never thought of it. Luckily, for those that are new to this channel, the aquarium gallery used to be an old garage. I ripped it down and built a whole new building. So this should be about three feet. I'll give it a foot of space and then three feet from them for maybe seven feet. I'll start here and that will give me a nice four-foot wide platform. I'll start with my little fire poker. Just like the gallery, I've got bylaws to follow and things I've got to do. So I'm going to have to put a fence around it and stuff like that. But since it's more than two feet deep, it's going to be five feet deep. That's pretty deep. It'll be good enough for the kids to get in and not drown. I think if it's going to go up to their nose, they'll have to go on their tippy toes and breathe. They don't swim very well. They sink really good though. That's 16 feet. The reason why it's going to be five feet deep is because, again, I've got to get it past the frost line because I'm not moving the koi in and out, in and out, in and out. They'll be out here year round. I'll make sure that the pond during the winter doesn't get fed and we keep a de-icer on top of it or something like that. I've never researched how to build a pond either. So a lot of this could be wrong. I could be doing it the wrong way or not ideal, et cetera, et cetera. But I love doing this type of stuff and just learning and making mistakes on my own. I do my own thing. I think it's important to make sure that it's actually level on the side. I am building this on a pretty level spot. If I build it, I'm about a foot down. It's nothing but rock. Okay, so not the largest pond ever, but it is my first one and I am building and doing absolutely everything, not only by myself, but literally by myself. I might as well get used to a little bit of the controls on the excavator before I go too crazy because I've got to dig this six feet deep. Now, I do have some experience with heavy equipment, but not this diesel type with these types of controls. So it's going to take me a little bit of time to get used to it. But I think, I don't know, if you put your mind to anything, you can do it. The plan with all this extra dirt is I've already started pushing it to the back of the property. It slopes down a lot back there and I'm going to even it out so our yard becomes more usable. It's not going to be pretty and I'm going to have to re-sod it out here. I've got 30 cubic yards of dirt to move. I'm already hungry. This isn't a good sign. Full disclosure, I have no experience with an excavator. In my past life, I was a bit of a laborer and I did drive some machinery. So the controls are very similar and I'm learning really quickly. But obviously, I'm going to have a bit of a learning curve. By the time this pond is dug, I'll be really good at it. I'm going to say that's it for today. I've got it to about four and a half feet deep so far. Way more soil and dirt than I thought. Tomorrow, I just got to remove another half a foot of, it's mostly loose soil. And then I need to shape and flatten the walls. But coming along, I've got way more done today than I had planned. I wasn't planning on starting this till tomorrow. All right, let's pick it up tomorrow.