Waterfall Issues:

Because the water was being pushed about 14 feet up into a waterfall riser, the result was an incoherent stream of water that had 14 feet to fall. Without a significantly more powerful pump to push a lot more water through the fall, it got frayed and it was easily affected by the wind. This, of course, caused the pond levels to drop significantly leading to additional expense of adding water.

Introduce a second pond layer halfway between the initial waterfall and the original pond. Reducing the distance the water had to travel and changing its orientation would allow us to keep the water in the pond and would add a new aspect to the water feature.

Design 1 – I had planned to use a high-quality rigid pond liner for the top pond. From the top pond, a wall of water would fall into the main pond. This would enable us to keep the wall of water feature while adding a more easily accessible pond layer.

Preparation

Before I did anything with the pond, I cleaned out the bottom pond and got all the debris that I could out of it. I noticed the water level was low, but figured I would address that later.

1. Excavate an area for the base of the pond, allowing the extruded lip to protrude both under the existing water pathway and into the lower pond. Potentially use the tree to support the pond liner.
2. Fix the Retaining Wall (see retaining wall below)
   1. Remove existing hardboard and untreated 2x4s
   2. Purchase 4×4 and 2×4 pressure treated lumber
   3. Purchase tileboard and tileboard nails/adhesive
   4. Purchase 3/4 chipboard and underlayment
   5. Purchase cement and lathe
   6. locate large rocks
   7. Install the 4x4s in cement bases with 2×4 crossbars
   8. secure the Chipboard to the 2x4s
   9. fasten the tileboard
   10. fasten the lathe
   11. place the rocks
   12. place the underlayment

Installation

1. Install the pond liner (see Pond Liner below)
   1. Rock/Brick in the pond-liner base
   2. Place the Pond Liner, infill with dirt
   3. modify the liner to facilitate waterfall into the  bottom pond
2. Re-route the water from the original waterfall origin to the top pond.
   1. Build a wire armature to make a rock structure to reroute the water.
   2. Determine how to support it and seal it.
3. Implement a filtration system and lights.

Excavation

This is when I first ran into problems. What appeared to be solid ground was actually mostly chunks of asphalt, cement, discarded construction supplies, etc. It became obvious after a week that there was no way to insert the pond like it was supposed to be installed. The roots of a neighboring tree and the small tree stood in our way as well.

Pond Placement

I had already excavated a huge amount of soil to place the pond liner when I finally hit a large cement block that I could not move. This was apparently the furthest we could go for the pond. After trying a dozen different ways to position the pond liner, I decided to cut the small tree down, but keep it’s stump for support.

Supporting the Liner

Since I had already excavated a lot of soil for the liner, I decided I could place it where I had planned, but extend the overlapping part of the pond by reinforcing the retaining wall and building a small platform on which I could set the liner.

Rather than remove and rebuild the existing retention wall, I figured I would just build a wall in front of it and enclose the old retention efforts with a new wall to support the edge of the pond. This allowed me to keep the majority of the weight on the ground for the base of the pond, so I didn’t need a lot of support under the lip.

I tried to dig a hole to mount the 4×4 posts to support the edge of the pond and couldn’t get very deep because of the debris. I used  2×4 weather treated supports and chipboard base that would rest on the ground, but also extend over the old makeshift retaining wall. Then I would add some lathing to it and fasten rocks to the bottom portion, but use bricks for the top portion as though it was an extension of the existing wall.

Once the new faux-retainer wall was installed, I tried various ways of adding the rocks to the front of it to match the existing rock wall. I was carrying those huge rocks by myself and it wasn’t easy. While I was placing the rocks on the ledge of the existing pond, it began to crumble.

The original pond had been made without any real support for the water. The 2x4s used to make the ledge were worn and had started to decay. Any weight and they started to break. I decided to just reinforce the existing wall and continue with my project.

Placing the large rocks on the edge of the pond where the retainer wall was proved disastrous. The lower pond could not take the weight and completely crumbled, ripping the liner and adding to the existing leakage problem.

At this point it became obvious that I would have to first get the lower pond working correctly, then I could finish with the upper pond. The project goes on hold until the original pond can be rebuilt.