Day 9, Sunday, June 7, 2026: Leveling up!

The builders were greeted in the morning by some chilly weather. Whatever happened to the famous Kelowna summer? Nonetheless, our builders marched on, led this breezy day by K, who was at the site, all decked up in his toolbelt and paraphernalia at 7, while the rest of us struggled out of our beds to begin day 9 of this project. It was going to be a big day!

While K worked on the electrical set up, P worked on connecting the pump to the WiFi, which had a few delays when the phone disconnected from WiFi this far away from the house. We’ll probably need to figure out how to give this motor a more stable connection if we want to be able to use the app to control the skimmer.

We moved on though, as D excitedly brought out “the tub”, which turned out to be this kiddie pool which developed kinks when we tried to scoot it closer to the pump over our dug out yard. Undeterred, D simply stuck a thin wooden plank underneath the collapsing tub and proceeded to test out the pump, which miraculously worked. In fact, the jet from the pump was quite vigorous, though the expert opinion of the crew was that it would be controllable using rock weirs to slow down the jet and volume of water, should the need arise.

Next, we wanted to figure out how much pond liner we would need. Our friendly local pond expert had impressed upon the need to be somewhat accurate in these calculations as the store would not accept any returns on this expensive buy. So, this would be a one way door! D had the idea to use a tarp to try and fit the same around our pond, and get a feel for how we would place the big and small rocks around the bog shelf to stabilize the pond liner. It was a nice simulation and we realized we needed to factor in the topography, which would result in a lot more folds and potentially multiple pieces of the liner to cover the stream in a waterproof design. We were learning so much on the job!

Meanwhile, K was done setting up the conduit and moved on to burying the electrical cable in the trench. P offered to help and got a hang of the wires with some instructions from K. Y helped in burying the cable under a layer of dirt.

Now that we had the electrical cable buried, we thought why not try running the pipe from the skimmer box on the big pond back to the small pond to see how it fit in the trench.

We spent some more time putting on all the fittings around the skimmer to get a list of all the parts we wanted. We also dug out more dirt around the big pond to ensure all the various cables and pipes had space to fit in the little area around our underground irrigation box standing proxy as electrical box. K and P went to Home Depot to get all the missing parts that we needed. At the same time, D and Y went looking for some big rocks to set up our big pond waterfall. This turned out to be a tough task as some of the rocks were too heavy to lift with the help of a hand truck and too tricky to navigate up the slopes to place near the head of the big pond. Note that the pictures of this task aren’t included as Y was busy trying to not get squished under the weight of said heavy rocks!

The morning shift had exhausted us so much that mama E’s help was needed to rejuvenate the tired builders.

Next, we started the pain-staking task of leveling, re-leveling and re-leveling yet again; from the left shelf of the big pool, from the right edge, from the bottom of the skimmer, from the front edge of the ledge…and it went on. The water level with respect to the overflow had to be just right. The group was so worked up about the water level that P and K came to fisticuffs over it! Of course calmer heads prevailed to break them, rather their verbal duel apart.

P and Y laid out the pipe over the buried electrical cable and covered the trench with dirt with more help from K. It was done so well that we couldn’t even tell where the trench used to be, aside from the ends that were left exposed for the connections.

The next few hours, we worked on more leveling measurements, digging out wide enough spaces to place our showcase waterfall rock, digging, and releveling again.

It was late in the afternoon, after we had started building out the embankments around the pond edge on the top, and the stream beds that we saw something yellow sticking out of the top of the trench near the electrical box. It dawned on us that in our excitement to see how the pipe fits in the trench and underneath a myriad of roots, we had forgotten to put the tape K had gotten all the way for us underneath the pipe. And, there was no way we were going to dig up everything again, so somebody would just need to remember where the wires are buried for posterity.

We tried to establish landing posts for the bridge over the stream, but K convinced D and P that we needed to research the materials and exact design some more to ensure the right curvature, robustness and slippage prevention on the bridge.

We moved on to continuing to finish the pond edges and stream embankments with yet more dirt and gravel so that we would be ready to go with the pond liners once the store opened on Monday.

After making some final measurements, some of us called it a day. We’d had a long and productive one! Though, a couple of us had taken root in the bottom pond and continued to shovel until the reporters had long retired for the day – we think we need more of these dedicated types around here.

Once again, dinner was glorious and felt hard earned after the day’s labor. Thanks mama E for keeping us all well fed!

Tomorrow, we hope to conquer and line those ponds. À demain!