Pond in a Coffee Table

Can I get a price on this table? All right, this is the miniature pond inside a coffee table video. So I'm going to start by touching up this edge, primarily this one, because I don't know if you can see all these scratches in it over here. I'm going to try to buff out these scratches and redo the finish coat to get rid of those as best as I can. Then I just have to put a bottom on it. Once I've sealed the floor of this with an epoxy, I can then put in my pond. So the epoxy is just to help seal the wood so that moisture in here doesn't rot the wood. But the pond is going to go in this tub. This is actually a water catch basin for water heaters. I got it at Home Depot for $11. This basin actually has a drain port of its own. So I found the fittings I needed to hook up to this one inch pipe down to a three quarter inch pipe down into a half inch plug that will be out the bottom of my table so that once this is all built, if I need to drain it to move it or clean it, I can just take the plug out of the bottom and drain the table and put the plug back in and I don't have to scoop it out with a cup like I did my last one. So last time I made one of these, I realized that with the glass on top and the whole thing enclosed, all the water would just stick to the top and fog up the glass and make it impossible to see the inside. The solution to that, I found, was to put this tiny little computer fan inside on one end and drill a hole for air to exit on the other. And that airflow would keep the top glass defrosted like a window defroster in a car. I also have my power source for my light and my pump and the fan all in the table so that it all comes off of one cord. And I'm going to put this in when I put the floor in so that this is already in place and I don't have to drill a bigger hole. A sheet of plywood to fit this size was like $30. So I'm using scraps. The floor, the base is nailed up. These will be nailed in from the side and it will all be glued in the corner. And then I'm going to seal the edges in this seam with the caulking. And then I'm going to epoxy this and let it dry. Okay, so after using the varnish remover and a little clean sand and two coats of stain, I've got my epoxy on the top. I think it looks a lot better. It's not perfect, but those scratches are gone. You can't really tell where they were and I think I've made it even enough that it's blended in with the old coat, the old color, and it looks pretty good. So my epoxy on the inside is dry as well. So I'm going to start putting the pond into the middle of the table here and at least start laying it out to see what it's going to look like. waterproof my plants so I can put some extra soil in here and have my plants sit in here and this will catch the water to keep water out of the wood. I am going to use the spray foam to fill in all the rest of this void. So my plants will go in and then this will fill in around them to fill this space so that my river rock can go over the top of this and I don't have to just fill the whole thing with rock. Alright, well there's no turning back now. Two plants there, plant there, a larger plant here, a little plant here, foam to keep that foam out of the electrical, a small plant here, and then another plant there. Okay so I got my plants in and the foam is dry. I've carved it down as far as I think I need to and I found a good rock that fits over the electrical stuff to hide that and now I'm putting in some river rock to try to tie all this together. Most of it is stable and solid where it is. The main waterfall is it's own piece that can kind of be shifted around and some of the rocks are going to be loose but this thing is never going to be tipped up on it. It's stable enough that I think if I load it into the back of my car I can get it to it's destination in one piece. Look what it did. It's really pretty. It's really pretty? Yeah. With the hole I drilled for the water to come through it was jetting up and it would have been hitting the glass and we don't want that so I drilled these extra holes off the side to make the water angle out away and that was working but now I have this ugly piece of foam in the top here. So that was more of a test. So to fix this I'm going to lower this rock down a little bit. I'm going to remove this ugliness from the bottom because I don't need it and I'm going to put a new top rock on here which will also create more of a little fall rapids down here and then I'm going to set this up on a few other smaller rocks so that it's not this ugly plastic black stuff we're seeing here. Okay so I've glued a bunch more of those rocks around the edges and I think I have the main little waterfall thing done. I carved off a little more of the foam so that the pump fits underneath it better and so that you don't see the foam as easily and then I found another water plant from my water feature up front that I think will fit in here and I want to put guppies in it. But I can't put fish in it until it's in my house because once fish are in it I can't really move it. So I'm going to drain the water out and put this in my living room and then go get some fish to put in it and then I'll be able to film my final shot of the whole thing done. Yes! Woo! I didn't have to take any rocks out. That's awesome actually. The rocks in the pond slid to one side but nothing else moved. Okay so I finished this thing and filled it and put fish in it before realizing that it has a leak on the bottom and I was going to just film from the top side and pretend that leak doesn't exist so I can finish my video and fix the leak later but I think this is a good opportunity to show that I often hit rug blocks. These projects don't always come easy and that's not always a bad thing. So the underside of the table is soaked in a section and I think it's dripping from that down spout I put in that may not have glued properly so I'm going to drain it half way so that I can fix that and hopefully not kill the fish I put in here and then we can call it done and I can finish this project. Alright so this rubber seal is loose and I think it was leaking just through these threads because this thing is not very thick and that rubber seal was loose. That is an oversight on my part because that was like the first thing I put together when I got this tub was I put this thread on and I remember thinking to myself I'll need to seal that later and I never did. I never went back and it was just loose threads and I'm just praying that that was actually the problem and it doesn't continue leaking but I'm going to seal those threads better and put this back down and hope it's not leaking. Alright it's dry under there. The leak is patched. I got these suction cups in the bathroom section of the Dollar Tree and I use these to lift the glass off so I can clean the glass. The fishies are in there. They hide really really well. So you might not see the fishies but there are six little neon tetras in there swimming around. Water weighs a lot so I went ahead and put another cross beam under there to reinforce the scrap wood I used and it looks a lot more solid now. I don't think it's ever going to fall out the bottom. I'm going to put a black backdrop up here and I'm going to film my final shots of this thing so that you guys can see the finished project. So if you appreciate this project and you think this was cool go ahead and leave a like on this video down below and leave a comment. Subscribe to my channel for more cool projects and I'll see you guys in the next video. Shout out to my wife who is with the kids in the bedroom right now so that I can do this. Love you babe. You can have your living room back now.