Me: "We're going to build a pond!"

Them: "Oh yes, will that be like the fence?"

Me: "...................................Shuttup"

Friday evening after the heat went out of the day and we had a few hours of daylight left, Matt thought it was a good idea to start digging a hole.

And so we (he) dug.

The digging went on into the night, we discovered lots and lots of broken pottery and big rocks in the dirt, and we stopped digging about 9pm.

The next day we went to Stone and Water World, on Marua Road in Ellerslie, to check out the ponds and get our supplies. Unfortunately traffic got the better of us as there was a huge sale on at the ASB Showgrounds in Greenlane, and races on at Ellerslie Racecourse, so it took nearly an hour to get from our house in Blockhouse Bay to Ellerslie. Once we got there we were greeted with helpful advice, and prices were about what we expected. Our purchases included:

1x Feature Base $59
We picked up three bags of builders sand from Placemakers also, at $6.99/Bag.

After some more digging we fitted the pond and started filling in the gaps with sand (see photo). We didn't have any topsoil to fill in the rest of the gaps, so that was left until the next morning.

The current version is pictured here. We filled in all the gaps with topsoil, half filled the pond with water and put the pump in, just to stop the water stagnating. We still need to bury the cable but we'll do that when we get around to lighting, no sense in digging several times. Next weekend we'll get some rocks and play around with different designs, and maybe even drain and clean the pond, and start naturalising the water for planting.