The Ultimate Outdoor Living Space Starts with a Pond!

We're going to build them the ultimate pod. It's got a wetland filter. It's got biofalls. It's got a skimmer box. It's got jets. It's got a bridge. It's got a little bit of everything. So this is definitely my favorite space. And you can see why it's everybody's favorite. I love the way that this pond was laid out, but really used this great outdoor living space. Now that I've got it all laid out, I think the next step is really to come in and start stripping off some of the grass. Main reason I like to strip off some of the grass is if I came in here and just started digging, digging, digging, a lot of that grass would just end up in clumps around the berm. And then sometimes that grass wants to grow back up through the berm. And there's nothing worse than weeding grass through soil. So we're going to try to strip off some of this stuff. It'll also reduce how much it settles. So we'll haul away a little and then bury the rest. All right. So you can see it kind of stripped away here. The other reason I like to strip away some of the grass is it really kind of defines my palette. Now I've kind of created the canvas that I'm going to work within. But it gives us an idea. So I've got the pond laid out. We're going to start digging. We run into all kinds of stuff. You know, here we just found some old lighting cable. No big deal. There's probably something that ran to the back corner before. Here we are getting things excavated. You can see how great things are looking. We're well on our way. Now notice the integrity of these shelves or the shape of all these things. We really spend a lot of time making our shelves look perfect. And it's not because we're anal or anything else. It has a lot to do with the ability to be able to stack boulders. We make sure everything's nice and level on those shelves because it'll just make it that much easier. Every bit of this dirt is being used to create our berms for our waterfall and the back edge of the pond over here. In fact, we're probably going to bring in another eight yards of soil on top of this because that clay is just miserable to plant in. So you can really now see the perfection of all these shelves. We're going to get our fabric in, our liner in. You guys can narrate the rest because you've seen all this. You can see a stack in our wall. We're going to come in, use the Unilock wall material here. And the reason we're using that is I just wanted to keep it nice and narrow underneath that deck. The deck builder did a fantastic job putting in that curve there and being able to cantilever the stuff out without seeing any posts, which is not an easy thing to do, but he did a fantastic job. The other thing you're going to see in the wall there are these little black tubes. Those are used for jets. So we have a plumbing line that goes back behind that wall and then tees off to these jets. You see kind of how we build these ponds. Big boulders here, small boulders here and there. We do these little landslides of rock and gravel in between some of the boulders. Big boulders hiding the outside edge of the wall stone, just kind of hiding where the wall stone ends and where the boulders begin. I never want to create a necklace look effect. You'd never see that in nature. So do these little landslides. It adds a lot of character to the pond. So there's that wall basically finished. We have to hide some of the corners up there on the top. Here's Andrew and Chris working on setting these bowls. Now, I love the bowls, you guys. I think the bowls are just fantastic. One of my biggest challenges, though, is trying to get customers to understand how great they look. I think the mindset is that, hey, we're building this natural looking pond. And what is this architectural element going to look like on the edge of the pond? And to me, adding a manmade element to the pond is no different than that deck. You would never stumble upon a pond in the woods and see a deck over it. Nor would you see the bowls. And I like the bowls because I think they add some visual interest. You can set them up to actually be filters that help with circulation. But I think they just look really cool. Tell me this. Tell me, what would you say if you were trying to sell a bowl to an existing pond? But here they are kind of getting there. Our intake bay is getting all cleaned up over there. Now, this intake bay has got a skimmer box on the intake bay. The main reason is I still want an easy way for the customer to empty the debris out of the intake bay. So most of that debris will get pulled back into the intake bay and then the skimmer box grabs it from there. Hey, guys, as you're watching this video, make sure you check out the link below. It's the only time we've ever done it. We are doing a backyard makeover giveaway. 100% free for you guys. You guys can win a backyard like this, if not even nicer, just by clicking the link below. Now, here's something really special. We're doing a mini wetland filter, and it's special because you guys are the first people to see a wetland filter with this new style. Go in on a pond. We've updated our snorkel. We've updated the centipede. We are even using new bio media. Now, the wetland filters in the past couple of years, we've been doing centipede snorkels, small aqua blocks and then aqua blocks filled with bio balls. This new one has the new snorkel. Really cool. Really strong. New centipede, small aqua blocks and then aqua blocks filled with our new bio tubes. The reason I love the new bio tubes, they have more surface area than our bio balls had in the past. The more surface area means more beneficial bacteria growth. Basically, a biological filter is a giant breeding ground for bacteria. The more bacteria you have growing in the pond, the healthier a pond is. More bacteria is breaking down fish waste and other organics. And that's really what we want to do in a biological filter. There's that intake bay all finished up. All kind of notched into that cove back in there, which will help pull all the windblown debris back into one isolated area. Another look at some of those landslides. Just breaking up the monotony of everything. Probably wondering why do we have a tent when there's no rain? I'll tell you, because it was 110 degrees outside. In fact, some of the guys went down on this job with some heat exhaustion. This was a fun project, but a little rough on the bodies and the brain just because the heat index for the entire week was in the 100 plus temperature. And if you live in Chicago, when it's 100 degrees, there's also a bunch of humidity that comes with it. And so it was just brutal on everybody. And so we were trying to keep everybody cool, calm and collected. It didn't really work, but but we still had fun. All right. Here's some plumbing stuff. Nothing really exciting. But what you're looking at is a three inch pipe that goes to a three inch manifold that'll split off the two two inch lines. Here we're doing that because we have two biofalls on this project. So I have one 9000 gallon per hour pump feeding two biofalls. And it's too hard for me to figure out where is all the water going to go? Water wants to take the path of least resistance. Theoretically, all the water should go to the biofall that's closer because I don't feel like messing around with guessing. We just put a couple of ball valves on there. That way I can regulate the flow from one biofault to the other biofault. Just doing some touch up work, finishing edges. We did bring a water truck in on the project. Water in Palos Park is pretty expensive. The water truck was only 400 bucks. So it was cheaper to bring in, you know, 7000 gallons of water for the water truck than pay Palos Park to fill it up. And it fills it up really quick. So in this pond we have two biofalls. We have a 6000 here and a 6000 here. The reason we have two is we need it for that much filtration. We've got a 30 some foot pond by about 15 feet wide, probably have done a wetland, but two biofalls will adequately fit in or filter this pond. What we did with this is set them at two different heights. So you can see this guy here has set down quite a bit lower than this guy here. So on this side, I want to take advantage of the filtration of the biofalls. The water is just going to kind of pour out of it. So we made sure that this biofall was level with my spill stone sitting back over in here. So it's really at the same height. This is going to get more of this just kind of spring fed, just kind of roll out of this area here. Here, we just kind of eyed it and said, all right, we're going to set it about this high should get a little 10, 12 inch fall out of it. But when I put my level across here, you can see I don't quite get that much water levels like down in here. So I really only have like a four inch grade change. The main reason I didn't set it higher and it would have looked great to get another waterfall this high right here. But if I set it this high, soil has to come up this high. And if soil comes up this high, it's got to come out flat a few feet and then taper. And we're really running out of real estate in the rest of our yard. So we would have had to take our berm about another 10 feet out or bring in another 15 tons of boulders to retain a bunch of soil, which we didn't want to do. So now we're looking at what kind of waterfall that we want to build out of this. Originally, I was thinking a sheet style fall would fall here, but a little three inch sheet style fall is getting to look kind of silly. So I look at the rocks we've got and I've got my eye on one sitting over here. So I was looking at this flat one. I've been kind of saving this flat one for a long time, thinking that this rock would actually stand up this way. I could use it inside of a wall someplace. But now looking at the height of that bio falls, I feel like if we level this guy out, put this flat side back here up against the fall. This has a lot of different character and action to it. We can get water just kind of roll out of this and drop off. So I'm hoping this is going to work. We're going to go ahead, strap this up, dry set it, set it up there. See what we have to do to the earth. See if we have to add soil. See if we have to take away soil. See what we got to do to dig this thing in. Get it nice and level. Once we've done that, then we'll seal up our bio falls. The main reason we never seal that liner first is because this allows me now the freedom to manipulate the ground underneath without the liner being attached to the bio falls. The liner is attached to the bio falls. There's no way I can take the liner back and dig and alter the earth to get this to sit just right. So let's go set this thing and see if it works for us or not. So the rock worked out perfect. We did dry set it, set it in there. Now we're going to hook up the liner, the bio falls, get that back in there. And now I'm going to start messing around with that big waterfall that's coming into the pond. Pretty simple waterfall, big rock on one side, big rock on the other, and then a flat rock in between. But I had some of these spaces right where my hand is here. You can see me pounding a rock in. There's a big gap between our spillway rock and the frame rock. And sometimes I intentionally do this so I can put these other little rocks in there, which gives the waterfall a little bit more character. I want to kind of pound them in. I'm going to get them set in there just right. We did work with Wasco Nursery on this, or at least had them bring out the plant material for us. I love working with Wasco. I've been working with them for so many years. Matt, the owner out there is fantastic. And he really shares in the same vision that I have for everything. So he brought us some really cool plant material. One of my favorites is this Ice Dragon Korean Maple. Really cool plant. Here's Andrew digging the hole for it. It's going to be kind of the focal point of the whole pond. The tree will get about 10, 15 feet tall, maybe about the same in width. But it has that dainty leaf. Amazing fall color, even some pretty interesting spring color as the new buds and leaves are developing. Got another really cool red bud over there. And as that red bud develops, what I'm looking forward to is as that tree gets bigger and bigger and bigger, you cross that bridge and then walk underneath the canopy of the tree. The landscape is really like putting, what's Greg the pond guy say all the time? The Christmas lights on the tree. How you decorate it makes it your own. For this case, the homeowner really wanted us to do the landscape because he loved the vision we had with every boulder and the way the pond was laying out. He didn't trust another landscaper to come in and carry out that vision. This is my favorite part. As much as I enjoy building the pond and designing the pond and meeting with the customer, I love coming back two weeks later, three weeks later, even sometimes two years, three years later, one to see how the pond has progressed, but also to meet back with our customers. And so we're back here. Bob's sitting out here the exact way I left him. He was sitting on that deck the entire time we built the project, just harassing us and giving us giving us grief. One of my favorite customers of all time, though, he was really, really involved with the design. He's out here just sitting back and enjoying it. And I'm going to take you guys now on a tour and show you why he never, ever leaves that spot. Come on. So as you come into the yard, you can see the waterfalls in the back. You really are just kind of taking it all in. You've got these different bowls. You've got the bridge. And you guys know if you've seen the channel before, how much I love incorporating the bridges. But we've got a great bridge in there. Big waterfalls. There's just so much going on. So you're kind of confused at this point where to go. Do you go sit up on the deck with Bob and Mary or do you come over here? We're going to go this way. And you come over to one of two of the different bowls we have on here. We have a 50 inch bowl and one of our original 40 inch bowls. And the reason we put these bowls on was really just to give a little bit more visual interest. So from this room sitting directly behind you, which is a family room, they could see a waterfall clearly from their chairs inside there. So we get that nice little horsetail drop over there and then we accentuate that bowl or accent that bowl with another bowl over here that they can see a little bit better from the deck on this side. Of course, the bridge takes you off into the yard where you're really going to appreciate the view back at the house over here. And I love being able to have a deck cannon lever out over the water like that. We used our Unilock walls right up that side, which gave a nice clean look. And what I like most about the Unilock walls is if I had to come up three feet deep like that or three feet tall like that with boulders. First, it's very, very time consuming stacking boulders three feet tall. Also, three foot boulders usually have a lot of girth to them. So they're taking up a lot of volume in the pond where Unilock walls are only 10 inches wide. So I can come up pretty high, pretty quick and straight without taking up a whole lot of water space inside the pond. You'll appreciate that more as we get the view from up on the deck. As we come over here, you can see this cove over on this side. A lot of pond over in here. Two rules you want to follow every time you put a bridge in. The bridge has to lead to something. So in this case, it's a shortcut to get out into the yard. And eventually there's going to be some bird feeders over here. So the bridge takes you out over to the bird feeders and a shortcut to the yard. The second thing, there has to be enough pond on the other side, on both sides of the bridge to force people to use the bridge to go over. If we only had three feet of water on this side of the bridge, it would be easier just to walk around the bridge rather than go over the bridge. So remember those two things when you're designing your water features. Make sure there's a lot of pond on either side of the bridge and the bridge should always lead to something. A couple other things I love about this size of the pond. Check this out. Just taking boulders and having them kind of come up out of the middle of the water. So water is surrounded all the way around them. This is done for two reasons here. It's because we have a skimmer box on an intake bay. So this boulder actually really helps with a lot of the circulation coming through this area, getting pulled into our intake bay. So underneath that lid is a pump vault. Underneath this lid is our skimmer box. So this pump vault here feeds jets and waterfalls. The skimmer box feeds bowls and a new wetland filter. So as you come across the bridge, we take this nice little blue stone path walkway, come over into here. And what I really wanted to show you guys, and we're going to have to try to stay off of some of the new grass seed that's been planted, but show you guys the amount of work that goes into a berm that supports a waterfall of that height. One of the biggest challenges we had on this job was getting a decent sized waterfall facing back towards the house and a yard that sloped pretty aggressive away. So we took not only all the soil out of the pond, but also brought in 15 yards of soil to top dress all of this just to create a berm that looked like it belonged here. Here on the backside of the berm where you see all kinds of outcropping type boulders. The outcropping boulders there for two reasons, one for aesthetics, but two and more importantly, just to help with a lot of erosion. This is a pretty steep berm right here. And if I didn't break up some of these big, steep angles on the soil, this would eventually erode and come down in the yard. So it really helps kind of stabilize everything. As you come this way, you can see some bigger walls where the dirt was getting really, really steep. We have these six foot cedar trees that will eventually get into the 15, 20 foot range back here. But every single time we're planting behind a waterfall, we want a lot of height. The idea behind that is when you're staring at a waterfall, your eyes will stop at the waterfall and not carry on to the neighbor's property behind you. Every angle of the yard, we want it to be kind of a different experience. You saw we came around from the one side. If you came around from this side, it's a much different view. So now we don't see a waterfall at all, but we do see that bowl. So we're greeted more by the bowl. We still see the bridge. We see that water lily underneath the bridge, which looks really cool. And it kind of invites us to come this way. And as you come around the corner, you're greeted by a pretty magnificent waterfall. So what I love about the waterfall is really just the simplicity of it. If you've ever watched our videos before, we explain how we're building waterfalls, follow designs from Mother Nature, right? What is Mother Nature doing when she builds a three foot high waterfall or a four foot or five foot or six foot high waterfall? And the idea is whatever size waterfall you see, usually there's that size boulder sitting next to it. For example, if there was a three foot high waterfall in nature, there's usually a three and a half or a four foot boulder sitting next to it. Waters come down a hillside, eroding away the earth, leaving back behind stones that couldn't move. The other thing you want to do is build as few stones as possible. Mother Nature never builds a waterfall with a bunch of boulders stacked up on top of each other. So we get big frame on the left, big frame rock on the right. One rock in between that has most of the water coming over it. Now, with this rock, we got lucky because there was a natural little notched out area. So we kind of brought this in knowing water could hit that. And this would hold back the water from going back over this way. Look at the two biofalls behind me. And you're probably saying, what? There's two biofalls behind me. Yep, there's two biofalls sunk all the way down. So instead of getting big waterfalls coming out of the biofalls, it gives the illusion more that it's spring fed. Water's just kind of rising up out of this bermed area and then coming over this waterfall. The other thing we do with the biofalls, a lot of times contractors, homeowners, customers will set the biofalls and then immediately the waterfall comes out of it. Here's the waterfall. We took the biofalls and put it back on an angle like this, obscuring where the water actually came from. Once all this plant material behind me really starts developing, you'll never know that there's two big filters over here. And speaking of filters, we've got a third one. We put in a mini wetland filter. And so this wetland filter has four small aqua blocks filled with our bio tubes. Right here underneath the fake lid is the area where we'd come in. We'd pop, pop this off, come down here once a year. We can drop a pump down in here and suck out all of the sludge material that would accumulate on the bottom of this. What I love about these new small wetland filters is we can tuck them in just about anywhere. And you can see there wasn't a whole lot of real estate left over in here. But we got this nice little wetland filter snugged into this area here. Again, giving the pond one more spring fed type look as the water rises up through the aqua blocks, through the bio tubes, and then spills over through a little bit of gravel back into the pond. Helping with circulation and most importantly, biological filtration. So this is definitely my favorite space. And you can see why it's everybody's favorite space. I love the way that this pond was laid out, not just to be seen from inside, but really used this great outdoor living space that Bob had a deck company come out here and build. Working with Josh from the deck company was so nice because I was able to share with Josh kind of my vision on having this deck look like somebody had taken a bite out of it, like the pond had taken a bite out of the deck and that the pond was here first. So Josh came in, literally curved some of this Trex material here and curved the entire deck, which just invites you to come right up next to it. So you can sit on the edge, feed the fish or sit up tall over here and feed the fish from that area. But what an awesome, awesome place to sit. Hey, guys, tell me your favorite part. Hopefully you loved it. Don't forget, we are giving away a project like this very, very soon. And all you have to do is like, comment, subscribe and share. Just keep like, commenting, subscribing, sharing, telling all your friends and you'll be entered to win something like this or even better.