As you can see from the picture the garden was a blank canvass when we first moved in but it was after our second year and the addition of some decking that I decided I wanted more. I planned to situate the pond next to the left hand fence in front of my workshop and use the spoil from the dig to raise my garden. It was at this point I needed to replace my next door neighbours fence with concrete posts and gravel boards to take the extra weight of the earth and save money on muck away trucks or skips.

Late April I had pegged out my site and decided I would dig by hand the start of the pond to get a feel for size, shape and location. A few days later I hit a snag, a concealed electricity cable for my workshop that needed to be cut and rewired at a later date but not a problem, as I would rely on by brother in law who is an electrician.
I had also laid down some railway sleepers to create a stepped area for access to the workshop and in the photo on the right you can see the nice new fence that my neighbour helped me to put up.

My wife is the thoughtful planning kind who loves her lists and I really wish I had enlisted her help and spent more time at the researching stage to avoid the later problems.

After getting a foot down I hit flint and solid chalk and even with the help of friends and family we could not get any deeper, so had to hire a mini digger to finish the job. It was very difficult to get to the back wall of the excavation as we had already gone down too deep for the tracks on the digger to climb in or out. This was the first pitfall that needed some pick axe and kango drilling to sort out, but I did enjoy myself on the digger.

After a week we were ready for the concrete base and I had solvent welded my bottom drain and pipe work in place. Without the filter to hand I made the mistake of assuming where the feed to the vortex would be. I ended up purchasing extra bends and lengths of pipe to fit them together, which could have been avoided with some careful planning.

We had 1.5metres of concrete delivered semi-dry and it took 3 hours to shovel it all in and tamp down to a level base. Without the help of my father, wife and mother in law I think I would still have a concrete heap 80 feet away at the front of my house.

After two days the concrete had gone off and with the loan of a friends cement mixer I started to lay the concrete blocks leaving enough room to back fill with concrete. I am not a bricklayer so this was a little slower than I planned and started to take up evenings after work and all weekend but it was slowly starting to take shape.

I had also created shuttering for the reinforced filter base, and another metre of concrete was delivered for the back filling and the filter base. A few days later and I had finished the block work and very pleased with all my efforts too.