A Bigger Splash – week five – story of a swimming pond for a garden designer

I don’t want to bore you all with endless words and technical stuff on this. Goodness knows I’m getting fed up with having a mudbath for a garden week after week, so you lot must be bored stiff! So this week just a few quick pictures showing where we have got to.

New Oak sleeper wall going into place.

A major milestone this week – the oak sleepers started to go in. We excavated a deep trench, rammed back fill around the sleepers and then concreted. We are using vertical sleepers in order to achieve the sinuous shapes those pesky designers have come up with. Actually, talking of pesky designers, I tried to draw a SketchUp model of the pool this week to try and get my head round some of the underwater decking (and because I thought some of you might be interested in it). But with all the curves, after three hours, I had come to the conclusion that building the full size model in the garden would be quicker! Whose idea was this anyway? The level of the top of the sleepers is just above water level by the way.

Although still muddy, at least it is level mud now!

The huge piles of earth have mostly gone now. The level of the lawn (I use the word loosely here) has been raised by about 600mm, and the remaining large pile of excavated material will be used as backfill around the sleepers. So I can finally breathe a sigh of relief that I am not not going to have to devise a landscape solution for a mini version of the the Alps in the garden.