From DIY Pond Struggle to THIS Backyard Paradise.

Oh my god. It revealed. How does this happen? Do you just say yes, jump in? I would. I'm Brian Helfrich and this is not my channel. You're right, you clicked on the right button. This is Greg Wittstock, the Pond Guy's channel. I'm just helping out a good friend of mine. I'm here in sunny Colorado and I'm here with Brett Stanley with BR&D. How's it going, bud? Good. It's going really well. What are we about to see back here? This is a new build for us. This is a referral from True Pump, our local distributor. They're good friends with the owners. They were previous pond owners. They actually just moved into this place when we started, like literally closed when we started to work. So they were really raring to go. New pond build, pretty simple build. So we're gonna see a pond? Yep. You got some nice fish? Nice fish, tons of plants. 11 by 15, maybe a 10-foot stream. Uh-huh. Pretty simple. Well, let's go check it out. This is a hundred percent my favorite thing. I love when the front yard is like nice and kind of blends in with the but like when you come in and you're like, oh my god. It reveals. How does this happen? This is awesome. This is our bread and butter. This is, you know, the boiler plate, ponds, waterfalls, and just, you know, all the components are here. Plants, fish, it's filtration. Gorgeous. It's absolutely gorgeous. When you walk into a backyard and there's a water feature like this and it's designed right, literally your heart stops for a second. Your breath is taken away. It's not a huge pond. It's not a 10-foot high waterfall. But what else would you do in this space that would have that kind of impact? Yeah. Like there's nothing else that you could possibly do. This was a designated spot. This is where they wanted it. We went over consultation, size, scope, you know, and this is what we came up with and it fits in here just beautifully. Are the homeowners here? Yeah. I would love to meet them. Yeah. You must be Tiffany. I'm Tiffany. Oh, I got it right. I had a 50-50 chance. I'm Melanie. Nice to meet you. I'm Brian. Thank you. This is awesome. I absolutely love it. It's amazing. They did an amazing job. Brett, how long did this take? About a week. A week. Your access wasn't really easy. We came in through the side actually. That shed was not there. So we came in. They have a pretty good access gate over here on the side. So everything came in across the lawn into here. But about five days. Five days. What was it like working with BR&D and Brett? They were amazing. They didn't even show us a design. We just let them have it and it's just amazing. So you have to do something for me and really for the viewers. This is the hardest thing and Brett, I know you go through this too. So I do exactly what Brett does back home in the Chicagoland area and the hardest thing to try to get our customers to understand is this like leap of faith that you just take, right? And everybody does it because you can do a really detailed sketch and it doesn't show you this. Like there's no way to describe the impact. And so what would you tell viewers that are working with certified aquascape contractors? Do you just say yes, jump in? I would because they're the experts, you know. They've gone through all this training and they've worked with you guys and they just have this envision that I couldn't come up with on my own for sure. And they took us into account. We had some ideas. They tried to incorporate that. I would say, you know, after working with so many different companies on different types of construction, what meant a lot to us was our communication skills. And not only that, they took care of the yard. My yard's important to me. Yeah. And they put boards down, make sure that they didn't do that much damage at all. And so I just thought they were very considerate and great community. Yeah, it's so important. Well, you can tell he's definitely an artist. Yes. Right. The movement of the water, the scale of the stone. Brett, did you guys do all the landscape too? No. They did all the planting. Wow. Now we've got some other artists here. Yeah. Between the ground cover, there's probably between 450, 500, 250, 500 plants. Holy cow. That's amazing. The plain slate when they came in, this was just really bad mulch. The wall was new. Like I said, they just moved in. In two and a half years, it's changed a lot. It really has. Brett, why don't you do this? Why don't you take everybody on a kind of a private pond tour, show them the access that you had to deal with, why it took five days. Because I think some people would think, oh, like how hard is this? It's hard enough to have the vision and figure out where the stone placement and stuff goes, but it's all the behind the scenes things that people don't think about. Like how did you get into the backyard if that shed was there? Like all the different obstacles, even the mats that have to go down to protect the lawn so you don't spend two more days replacing grass and that kind of stuff. Right. Can you do that for me? Sure. Awesome. Thanks, bud. So this was a new build from scratch. This was just dirt. I think there was a bunch of these pavers down here when we started. They wanted a modest size pond. I think we call this 11 by 15. Took the dirt obviously from here and used it to build up the berm. One of the things we really like to do when we build ponds is we like to berm out as much as possible. That makes it look more natural. I know it's against a retaining wall, but having that gentle slope makes it avoid that volcano look that you get so much with some water features that you see. So that was the goal with that. We used every bit of dirt in here to build that. I don't think we hauled any out. I got a variable speed pump in it. SLD 4000 to 7000. 2500 biofall. This isn't a big pond, you know, but it's scaled really nice. It looks great, sounds great. We're making sure we're getting the visuals with the waterfall placements for the patio over here so they can enjoy it. We actually added this flagstone patio over here as an add-on during the project. You can see that they've used this little couch swing as a destination point for them. A couple other things. They wanted that statue up there incorporated into the build somewhere and we thought that was a good spot for it up there. You know, it gets a kind of a feng shui type look to it I guess. All the plants you see here were the homeowners. They wanted to take that on themselves and they did a fantastic job with it. It just looks great. This is what we do day in and day out. This is our bread and butter and this is the results you can get when you have all the right ecosystem parts in it. Filtration, skimmers, right size pump, fish. You can see there are fish in there and of course plants. Everything came in through the grass here and this is pretty typical access for us in Colorado. Very rarely do we get a work site where you can just drive a tractor up and drive equipment up and you don't have to worry about the yard and the landscape and we really, really try to minimize our footprint and our impact. This shed wasn't here when we started but our access came in through here so this is actually a really good staging area for us. We put all of our boulder here, gravel here and then it was two and a half years ago we built this but we probably wheelbarrowed all the rocks across over to the pond location and then we have our excavator sitting here in place and we'd strap each boulder and set it. If we're going to do it today it'd probably be $24,000 just for the pond. So Melanie, Tiffany, you guys were telling me something and I just thought it was so interesting. I remember my life when I started working for Aquascape before that I had built my own pond and you guys were telling me a similar story. Tell me a little bit about the process of building your own pond versus working with an experienced CAC like Brett over here. Other than we were much younger and had good backs. It was fun experiment for us, experience I should say, but we were dealing with a lot of clay soil Tiffany did a lot of the heavy work. Can you tell them what you did? I think it was back in 2012 we started out with this little round pond with a fire hydrant, water coming out of the fire hydrant. We wanted to make it bigger of course. Yeah. It was like a nine by five and then we had to haul all the rock in, dug the hole ourselves, run the plumbing, the pumps, didn't have really got any idea. We did some research but to have somebody come in that is professionally trained in that, they have a better vision, they know the equipment like we have auto dosing, we have the ion gym, our old pond, it was just like algae all over the place. We'd have some crystal clear water maybe for a month or so in the summer, but fall I'd be out there like almost with a rake getting all the algae. We found out a lot of mistakes that we made, it wasn't weak enough. Any rock over here I can walk on. Yeah it was a dangerous situation. Or the dogs would get in and ruin it of course. Yeah just having a certified office installer was just amazing. They have a better vision, they know what they're doing. It's the way to go. It was a great experience. We loved it. Can you imagine what it would be like to hire a CAC and just sit back and be like, well that looks like that's tough and it's not your problem. Like way more fun to watch somebody else build it for you. Yeah you know and that's when I'm doing consultations with people what I tell them is I can tell them the size, how long the stream will be, how deep it'll be, you know the width, all that parameters, no size of pump, how much flow you're going to get, but I can't tell you what it's going to look like. Even if I provide them with a drawing it's not going to look like there's that leap of faith. Yeah there's a leap of faith you have to have. You've been doing this just as long as I've been doing this. There's such an organic process right. We always talk with like the rocks kind of speak to you and this one I'm going to set it here and it's going to change the stream from going from the left to the right. We know where it's going to start, we know where it's going to end and let us just do our thing in between. Yeah well you guys thanks so much for letting Brett and the BRD team, Tyler come out here and taking that leap of faith with him. Joe True is great right. Remember her from way way back when. It was a pleasure meeting you guys. Thank you so much. Thank you so much. Thank you. Great job man. Awesome. So if you guys want a project like this check out the link down below. You can get a certified aquascape contractor in just about any corner of the country. See you guys soon. Bye.