OK, the saga and nightmare of my turtle pond (under construction, again!)
continues, so I've taken a vacation day again tomorrow (only day where it
might not rain for a few hours this week) and I think I have figured out the
heart of the problem. I didn't use a level when digging this small pond and
even though it LOOKED good, there is a portion where rain water was running
across the newly dug dirt and INTO the pond, thus, my water was muddy every
morning even after I keep draining the pond and refilling it. That solves
THAT mystery. After moving all the rocks to try and fix the above
problem, I found that rain water was also running UNDER the liner in the
same place, the dirt wall under the lining was deteriorating and crumbling
away, and the more it crumbled, the more water seeped into the pond UNDER
the liner. None of this was real obvious because, number one, I had stacked
and laid so many huge rocks to hide the ugliness of the dirt and number two,
it's been raining so darned much I haven't been able to be out there enough
to observe this pond! So, I've moved all the rocks (oh, my back!) and
pulled back the muddy liner from half the pond and drained all the water out
from above and below the liner. In cleaning up all the fallen dirt and
evening out the walls, my pond got a little larger. Should be a GOOD thing,
right? Wrong. I barely had enough liner to make it to the edge as it was,
now I'm downright short by a few inches in a few places. Just went and
bought a few more feet of liner and the double-sided tape for joining the
pieces, which I will attempt tomorrow. Anyone have any words of wisdom for
me, tips, advice or things THEY did wrong that they can warn me of? I
already know I'm going to be in trouble because the directions tell you to
lay the two pieces perfectly flat and make sure they are spotless and dry.
Well I'm NOT removing the original liner from the hole since half of it is
still weighed down by tons of rocks, and I'll clean it as best I can, but
no, it won't be spotless, it won't be perfectly flat, and it won't be
totally wrinkle free. In my defense, I don't think water will actually
ever touch where the liner is joined...it's just to give me the few extra
inches to make it under the rock border. There IS a lesson to be learned
from this, and the moral is, stop squeezing pennies and do it right the
first time. I was so eager NOT to buy any more liner than I needed to save
money, but now I've spent more than that trying to fix the problem. Any
other lessons you want to share?
Sue