#Thegreatpoolpondconversion -190628
Supplies arrived
We took a page from Henry Ford and found plans for a “sandbag filler”. We set to work building ours so we can fill 6 bags at once and hopefully, easily.
the finished jig
with bags attached, waiting for our first load of sand
we also spent last few weekends in general prep
we’re letting the adjacent field go au natural and moved some plants out there, cleaning up and clearing the decks.
Picked up some 16 foot boards to use as ribs across the empty pool to hold up the tarp.
16 foot boards vs Nissan Versa:
We’re gonna need a center post so rain doesn’t pool on the tarp.
Then a big thing happened and reality is here. We got a line on a guy with knowledge and a bobcat. This changed our plan all around.
We switched from sand to fill dirt because we thought that fill dirt was cheaper. From this guy it isn’t. Plus sand is easier to work and has no foreign matter. So we’ve come full circle from ‘good’ sand to bad dirt, and back to perfectly acceptable sand.
The first 20 yard load arrived this morning.
We were going to scoop and haul the fill back to the pool using a lawn tractor and dump cart bit by bit as we needed it. There’s a septic system in the way, etc. Anyway many technical issues ensued, not the least of which was the possibility of the empty pool ‘floating’ and popping out of the ground because it would be mostly empty for an extended period.
So our guy with the bobcat is going to move all 20 yards into the pool all at once, says he can avoid the septic, and then he’ll power-compact it. (We were gonna do that by hand too.) That’s roughly 60,000 pounds we won’t have to move or pound at all, even in bite sized chunks. And he can do this in a couple of hours in one day. We are, literally 2 months ahead and haven’t lifted a shovel yet.
We’ll be drinking mint juleps while we watch him work.
Stay tuned