Turning This Pond Into Everyone’s Dream Hangout!

And the thing that the pond lacked before, a destination type spot to actually sit by the pond. I think a lot of people wouldn't have thought this was going to fit over here. It doesn't make the pond look identical to any of the other ones. You just want to sit out here and enjoy it. It's a whole new perspective, a big dynamic change. Hey, so this one's going to be fun. Obviously, it's going to be a rehab project. And so you can see a couple pictures that the homeowner has supplied us with. And these are the exact same pictures I get every single time I go on a consultation. So anytime I go on a consultation, the customer is going to send me a couple pictures just so we can talk about what they want to do. And when I receive these pictures, then I usually give the customer a call back and we kind of talk about what the expectations are for the rehab. A big thing that she talked about with this one is first that the pond had a leak. And I could tell you in the style in which the waterfall was built with all of those little rocks, something probably shifted and caused a leak. So that was one thing. Just the style of the waterfall wasn't exactly what she was looking for. You can see the skimmer box is an older model skimmer box. Things have bowed and shifted quite a bit. A lot of times when I see it bowing that much because of some groundwater issues and things just cause it to heave and move around. Picture number three here gives you a totally different perspective of the pond. You kind of really now appreciate the size of it. And the other thing I'm looking at here is the mishmash of different rocks. You see these darker grape rocks here. Those are aqua blue boulders. Then you see some granite boulders. Those are the rounder ones. Then you see some ledge rock, which are these big flat pieces in here. Then you see some white rock over on the bottom right hand corner. That's a limestone that's indigenous to Illinois. Some other miscellaneous sandstone pieces mixed in up in the top waterfall piece. We've got five different stones here, which would really mean five different styles of water features. Now can we see a natural water feature with different types of rock in it? Of course, but in here it just looks messy. All these different things going on. Super busy. Lots and lots of small stone. So we definitely want to talk about getting some bigger stone in here. I also see the lack of any place to sit by the pond. So I met with the customer, went over a bunch of things. She asked me to do a small drawing. And here's the drawing I put together. And it's really just kind of a conceptual thing. Give you an idea of the space. And the one thing I really, really wanted to incorporate in the design of this water feature was a seating area. And the only place it made sense to do the seating area was on the back side of the pond. And now the main reason for that was because the front side had this drainage swale into it. And I really couldn't interrupt that drainage swale. So I wanted to leave the drainage swale as is, and then put a little seating area on the back hand side. By putting the seating area on the back hand side, an area to actually sit and enjoy the pond, it would require a bridge. And you guys know me, I love putting bridges into my designs. So I really wanted to incorporate that bridge. The other thing you're going to notice, just enough water on the left hand side for the bridge to make sense. Did draw on a bowl. We decided against the bowl with waterfall coming out of the bowl and went with a more personal element that we'll get into a little bit later. So first thing with any project is always going to be the demo. The demo and the site conditions on this project were pretty difficult. One, we're working in the city. Always challenging to get to and out of the city. There's some big mature cherry trees on the back side of this property. We're going to deal with some roots and pulling things apart. Really tough machine access that we had to put down an enormous plywood for our construction mats to get the machine in there and duck underneath a big bald cypress tree. So once the machine was back there, it wasn't that big of a deal, but it's really hauling all this stuff out. So once we finally got everything torn apart, then we start digging and we ran into some major, major old tree stumps. Now these aren't roots from the trees. These are just abandoned tree stumps that used to be here. And for some reason, even though the pond was 20 years old, these trees stumps were preserved. So it was really difficult getting this stump out of here. 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. Like, comment, subscribe and share. We'll be to your yard soon enough. So here we are excavating. The other thing we really want to do is give the fish as much space as possible. So we're going to make it a little bit wider and a whole lot deeper. And really the thing I want to do is eliminate some of the shallow shelves and just go straight down two feet. When we can do that, the fish just gets that much more space and the pond looks cooler. So we get it all done. Our site definitely had challenges from rain, obviously. You can see how much rain is coming through there. We tried to tarp everything, make it as dry as possible. When you get rain like that, basically it means you're going to have a muddy mess for the next couple days until things dry out. This project is going to be built with hand-selected moss rock. So I actually went to the stone yard and picked some of this stuff out. You know, when we order stone, when I order moss rock or any type of rock, but especially the moss rock, it can come in flat, it can come in chunky, it can come in five ton pieces, it could come in 300 pound pieces. So with this project, I really knew the look I was going for. And so I had to select every single piece. So here we are, we got the fabric in, the liner in, and then we're prepping for our wall. Now you see these walls done all the time. In this case, we're doing more of a convex wall where the curve goes in towards the pond. Normally we're doing a concave wall, which works way better for strength and stability of the wall. Here we just added a lot more glue and the design really called for a convex, which was the only way I was going to get enough room for that patio to sit in here. So we build our wall first and start working boulders off of that. You can see a big flat destination rock there also serving as a fish cave so the fish can get underneath that thing. Then we come in and we're going to start hand digging the rest of this patio space. The reason we had to hand dig it, we couldn't get the machine any further over there. So unfortunately we had to come in and hand dig this, which just brings us back to our roots and lets us know that we're still capable of doing things by hand. In fact, this pond actually had a decent amount of hand sized boulders put in. The machine wasn't used for every little part of it. We had to dig out the base a little bit deeper. We're going to put a blue stone patio in here, a New York blue stone patio, which requires a decent amount of base material. You can see that kind of going in here. Chris, our new patio guy, I wouldn't say he's new because he's been with us for four years, but we're really discovering that Chris is fantastic at putting these patios in. We got some big size giant pieces of that patio stone coming in, which will kind of leave her out over the water and then he'll fill in the rest. It's just kind of like putting a puzzle together. So here's the pond basically rocked in. You can see that fish cave there. A bunch of the bigger boulders are set and you're starting to work up into the waterfall, kind of coming up with some ideas on what angles things should look at. You can see the bridge is put in. We always cover the bridge throughout the entire project. Chris has done a great job finishing off that curve on that patio that kind of levers out over the water. So as the guys were working on the waterfall and stuff, I told you before in the original design, I had a spillway bowl designed over on the left hand side of that bridge. We decided to get rid of the spillway bowl and add a personal amending. So super cool. Anytime we can give a project some sentimental value, we love to do it. Sharon was just saying how she's almost at tears because this thing has been in her family for so many years. She's had this pond for over 20 years. The pond is looking amazing. And then we said we'd go ahead and figure out how to do this. Now I think I dove into a little bit more than I wanted to with it because we had to cut some pipe. We had to anchor it down to some brick down in through here. I've got this little splash area in here and what's happening is water comes down, but this is above water level. And I knew if this dropped onto a bunch of big rock, it would splash all over the place. So I just took a valve box, cut it to fit in here. And now this will go down in here and minimize all that splash. And actually where the light is, if you look down in there, it's down below water level. So this will drop actually into water level with that. So a little trick, but I'm just working on getting the fittings and stuff back through the liner. And it'll be fun to see this little element come back to life. I think the fountain is going to end up turning out really cool. Not sure about the pump size on it. I'm thinking it needs, you know, like a 500, 600 gallon power pump, but we'll see when we're all done. And so at this point, we're just about finished. Everybody's just coming together on this project to make it look perfect. I like the size of it. It's not a huge, giant, enormous pond. We're only talking about maybe 18 feet long, eight feet at the widest in any one spot. It just fits into this city lot really, really well. And I think it's so important when you design a water feature that you design how you're going to use that water feature, meaning do you put a deck into the design? Do you put a pergola into the design, a gazebo, a patio? When you're designing those spaces, how many people will be enjoying it? So think about all that kind of stuff. I think it's time that we take you back out to the job site, do our final walk through, and see what this thing looks like as it's matured. So this is my favorite part, the two-week visit, the follow-up visit to a pond. Now, unfortunately, I can tell you already with the torrential downpour that we got on the way up here, that pond's not going to be as clear as I'd like to see it. But it'll be interesting to see the pond and maybe what the worst case scenario could be after a big, giant storm like that. Anyways, we're going to get to see what it looks like. Oh, and I see that she's already added some of her own elements. Yes, the pond's a little murky. You can see that, but it hasn't phased the fish at all. They're coming up for some food here and there. You can tell Sharon's probably been out here feeding the fish. I know one of them's name is Ginger. I forget what the other fish's name is. But instinctively, without even telling you guys why I'm doing this, I walked over the bridge. And if you've seen our channel before, you know how much I love putting bridges. And in fact, this year, I think we've put in at least six of these guys. We had a bunch of these made for us. And what I love about this one so much is similar it is to all the other ones we put in. It doesn't make the pond look identical to any of the other ones. It's in such a different setting than all the other ones. Take a look at these other bridges and tell me how much different this one looks. Either way, if you've watched the channel before, you know my biggest pet peeve with a bridge is a bridge that leads to nowhere. Anytime I put a bridge in, the design of it, it has to take you a space. And this is by far my favorite part of this project, this little intimate seating area. So you can come over here, sit on the new furniture, it rocks, it swivels, it does everything. And look at and the fish know that I'm probably a food source. And so already the fish are coming up here looking for some food. But having this tucked into this backside, I think a lot of people wouldn't have thought this was going to fit over here, this small little six by eight foot patio. But not only does it fit, but it's perfect. And the thing that the pond lacked before, a destination type spot to actually sit by the pond, lose track of time, feed the fish and just sit back and relax. The old pond didn't have any of that. It was really just something that was part of the landscape. This is part of the landscape, but now you can actually interact with it. Sharon even talked a little bit about how the grandchildren are using it. She's excited to allow the grandchildren to get in here, have friends and family come over here and actually use this. She even told me her husband, who was kind of against the whole pond idea, that he's been caught out here reading his paper every now and then. The second thing I love is, of course, the waterfall. If we look at that old waterfall, just busy, just kind of a mishmash of different types of stone from aqua blues to granites to chilton to moss rock. It was a little bit of everything and too much. Here we've simplified the waterfall down to one, two, three, four, five different boulders, some little ones mixed in between. When we're building natural waterfalls, the key is to take examples from nature. If you saw a waterfall built in nature, the idea is big rock on one side, big rock on the other side. Water is eroded away to the earth, leaving back behind these stones and then moving in between those. Ed and Jack just did a fantastic job with this waterfall. Not only do I love the style of it, that kind of babbly brook, but I love the simplicity and then the sound. The sound is that deep babbling brook area. If you weren't coming to this side, you could easily come back over here and there's this big flat rock that just invites you up close to the pond, looking at it from a different perspective. If I had to pick a fourth, it would be the thing that has a little bit of story, this old well pump. It was a little challenging getting this guy in, anchoring it in place, cutting up and redoing some of the guts inside, but the fact that this has some history and was from her grandfather's place and she remember playing with it when she was a little kid and now bringing it back to life, adds some story to the pond, adds a little bit of sentimental value and anytime we can do that, we're happy to do it. So this pond, I think guys knocked it out of the park. Let's ask Sharon what her favorite part was. I don't even know where to start with this project. It was so fun. We met about a year ago. I think it was like in December of 2024, right? And now it's mid-October of 2025. You get an A-plus for being one of the most patient customers of ours ever. But was it worth the wait? Oh, yes. Yes, definitely worth the wait. And I knew it was going to turn out beautiful. Yeah, well, you had a lot of confidence in us and I knew as soon as we got here and Jack and Ed and the boys came out here, you just kind of, you know, I wasn't here right away and you just felt at ease, like the guys put you at ease. And so talk a little bit about your whole process, you know, from meeting me to working with Jack and Ed and the rest of the crew and how they handled like really a spectacular yard, you know? I would say that you made it more spectacular here. What you've shown me is how you could take what I thought was a beautiful pond at the time into something that's beyond expectations. Yeah. It's just fabulous. You brought it up a lot of notches from where it was. I found so many different new perspectives from how the koi are reacting to me, how the kids could go in it. Yes, a hundred percent. All the rocks are stable. Yep. And just feeding the fish from our new little porch here. It's just beautiful. Our new bridge here, which just makes it so much easier. It's a whole new perspective, a big dynamic change. That's awesome, you know, and I think you would have said everything I would have said, like the bridge, the patio, the big rocks and stuff. Tell me a little bit about working with Jack and the rest of Team Aquascape. These guys work in synchronization, everybody. You were with them and all of you, even when the young guys were there just doing their thing, they all knew what the job was. They were all working hard. They purposely placed, you could see just every rock. I was watching them. Every rock was placed purposely where they were put, from an inch apart to the big boulders. I like to tell people the placement of rocks is a little bit like playing chess. So like when we're setting one rock, it's not about just that rock, it's about the three moves later that need to happen and sometimes four or five moves later. So we might set one rock and you're like, what on earth are they going to do with that? But there's so much meaning behind the setting of that one rock. And for like, for example, they, you know, set this big flat one in here. We call those destination boulders, the kind of rocks that invite people to stand up to it, like walk up and stand up on them. But the placement of that rock then dictates how the other rocks are going to work with them and so on and so on. Love the waterfalls, love the sound of the waterfalls, love the bridge. And now tell me the story behind the well pump, because I came here and you were like, hey, is there still a possibility of getting this in? And where did it come from? It came from my dad's place. He lived in Galena Territory and we sold their place after my parents passed away. And I just saw that sitting out there and I remember as a kid playing with it and I just had to bring it home with me, never knowing what I was going to use it for. So is it safe to say that this is the first time this thing has been brought back to life in over 50 years? Maybe 30 years. 30 years. 30 years. Finally bringing it back to life. Yes. I think it's not, it's big, right? It actually stands a little bit more than four feet tall. Yeah. It's big, but I think it fits really, really nice. And it's not over, the sound of it's not overwhelming. I think we'll still tone it down a little bit more, like shrink the water down. But I think it looks great. It does. It does. You just want to sit out here and enjoy it. You want to sit out here. I mean, I've sat out here and just watch it fish. You've already got your chair out here and the little end table by it. Yeah. And then inside that end table is where I keep all the fish food. Oh, genius. Absolutely genius. Favorite part of my job is not just designing the feature. It's not just building the feature, but it's seeing how people use the feature, whether it's two weeks later or three years later. So I look forward to keeping a relationship with you coming back to visit. Thank you so much for the opportunity to do this. Jack and the boys all said thanks again. I told them they were coming. Everyone was beautiful. They did a fantastic job. Hopefully you enjoyed this episode. Don't forget, there's an opportunity for you to get a complete yard transformation just like this one. Look at the link below, enter the sweepstakes and hopefully we're in your yard sooner than later. Bye.