They Waited Almost a Decade to Build This Koi Pond!

Have you ever wanted something but the timing just didn't feel right? Like you've waited years to get this one thing. These homeowners waited almost an entire decade to get their dream koi pond and after doing thorough research via google and youtube they had their eyes set on our company for a number of years as the ones to bring their dream pond to life. So we're going to walk you through this advanced koi pond build and all of the crazy challenges that came with pulling it off and by the end of the video you're going to see how these homeowners grass hillside turned into a permanent staycation in the pond of their dreams. All right guys so the first thing I want to address is the challenges of this project. This is built on a very steep hillside going away from the house. This is a huge huge time suck when it comes to building a koi pond because it's not a flat area and yeah the pond viewed from the house above it takes a lot of design and forethought into that to extend the view away from the house make sure the water is actually visible make sure you can see some streams and uh yeah waterfalls are a little bit more of a challenge on steep slopes too. So um we had a lot of ledge rock during the dig we had to get a hydraulic hammer with uh literally to jackhammer out portions into tiny pieces get rid of that stuff it's a loud messy slow process a lot of extra labor but nothing seemed easy about this project. So another one of the biggest challenges on building a pond on such a steep slope is if you go to the lowest point and you excavate flat into the hillside you're gonna have a crazy tall waterfall and your pond's gonna feel like it's in a hole. So we had to build a five foot high boulder retaining wall around the bottom of this pond just so that we had the retention proper to elevate the water level and get it to a livable nice comfortable place. So what we had to do to accommodate this we built the inside of the pond first it was crazy we had a four foot high boulder freestanding wall inside of the pond that was going to be the pond wall and then we had to go outside of that and build a five foot tall 50 foot long boulder retaining wall a couple feet away from it and then fill with over 100 yards of imported topsoil and compact that in between the layers to prevent settling. It sounds easy when you say it fast guys but this was an absolute feat it was so much extra work to do that but it is totally doable it just takes so much work. Another one of the biggest challenges of this project was the driveway was a quarter mile long 120 tons of stone 130 total yards of topsoil we're talking hundreds of trips and every trip took five minutes it was insane how often that machine was running up and down the hill and how long it took we're talking days guys literally just to get that amount of material from up at the road down to the hill. So this is a pretty advanced koi pond design we went with a 20 by 30 we wanted to get a really ununiform shape to try and break out that viewpoint because they had so many that were elevated looking down at it so this kind of l shape wrapping around the corner with the waterfalls and the headwater starting from just around the side of the house through the glass windows so that it looks like from in the living room this thing is coming around the side of the house before it cascades down into there so it was a lot went into the design of that as well the waterfalls themselves they went above and beyond with the width of these things additional water flow just to make sure they were visible from a lot of these viewing areas so the boulder placement and the actual structure of this stuff was huge in accordance to what was going to be visible when we got done so it wasn't like a normal this is falling straight at your face you just build something beautiful and it all works out forethought had to go into every single way that the waterfall twisted turned where it was going to be visible from cost a lot of extra time but definitely it turned out and thinking of those things is how you pull off a project like this so making sure that you can actually immerse yourself fully with this water feature even with all those viewing areas that you have from inside the house we really wanted to make sure we took this one above and beyond so we decided to do a large blue gray flagstone patio right at the pond side butted up to it for enough for table chairs maybe a fire pit some nice retention with a serpentine flagstone staircase that winds right up going towards their pool area for just the instantaneous be able to connect seamlessly get down from your house all the way around your pool and then walk down to enjoy the pond so since these homeowners were so enthusiastic about their koi pond we definitely wanted to make sure we offered uh with hand selected japanese koi fish these were personally chosen by these guys we had literally got them from our shop we've been babying these guys for years and that was the final piece of the vision so they didn't even have to wait to get any of this stuff we literally came that last week when we were finishing up patio work acclimated the japanese koi got them released into there and i was getting videos and pictures sent messages literally that night every night after that until we got everything finished about how awesome it was to finally have the dream of the koi pond and see the koi fish swimming around in the underwater lighting after the sun went down absolutely beautiful so the result of all this the grass hillside completely transformed these guys did a ton of traveling back in their day and they finally wanted to just settle down and make this vacation and that's what this turned into the dream pond come true got that stuff knocked out make it to where you never want to leave that's the ultimate goal right they got their beautiful koi fish they've got their vacation destination right in their backyard and finally after almost 10 years of thinking this stuff through they had realized their dream