06/23/2026
Well friends…it’s is done!🥳🎉 (almost, minor cosmetic things😅)
MEGA pond is fully operational! This has been our largest undertaking BY FAR. Truly it has been an awful ride but we made it. This will be the mega pond story. Pictures and videos to come in other posts.
We originally had a 1,000 gallon koi pond and decided it was time to upgrade for both the fish and our turtles. We decided on building a 10,000 gallon pond, hence “Mega Pond”.
We built our 1,000 gallon pond by ourselves and decided this time around we would save a lot of time trying to hire out the big parts. Our original time line was to tear out our old pond in February and have fish in the water by the end of March / first week of April. We had someone who was going to dig the pond and set and level all our concrete blocks. They dug the hole and then never came back. That person really screwed us over on lots of time and money. They kept saying they would come finish but I couldn’t wait on them any longer. We contacted a company to come out and give us a quote to set and level the cinderblocks that would make up the above ground portion of the pond. They took a look and told us we would need a footing with rebar poured and that they didn’t do that. We were then referred to another company. They came out and gave us a quote that was high but at this point we were already over a month behind. They completely ruined our pond shape, poured a very unlevel footing, did not space the rebar out like we asked, and left a huge mess behind. To top it all off, the invoice was DOUBLE what they originally told us. We contacted them immediately about all the issues and they said they would return over the weekend to fix it. We never heard from them again. We reached out to the other company about setting our blocks and they said it would cost $11 PER BLOCK! At this point we simply could not afford that and were very behind our original completion date.
Unfortunately because this took much longer than expected, many of our largest koi did not make it. It was something completely heart breaking to us and made us feel like quitting. I believe if those two companies hadn’t screwed us over they would have been fine. Overall we lost around 13 fish…fish that we had grown and enjoyed for years.
We knew we needed to work hard and fast if we wanted to save the rest. We spent the next month working on the pond every day after work from 5pm-9pm and all day on the weekends. We set and leveled all the blocks, fixed the things the two companies screwed us on, and mixed probably over 50 bags of concrete to fill the cinderblocks. After that it was all the normal pond things: underlayment, liner, plumbing, filling it up, filtration, waterfall design, turtle island design, planting, and rock work.
We turned everything on a few weeks ago, repaired some minor leaks, and added our fish and turtles. So far everyone seems to love all the new space. The water is still very green but that it a work in progress.
Thank you to all of our friends and family who helped and supported us through this process!
