Expanding “The Lake”

This is a series of videos chronicling the expansion of what we affectionately call the “Lake”. The “lake started out as a watering hole no larger than a bathtub. It turns out this watering hole had great potential for growth!

Part 1

In 2008, this was no larger than a bathtub…right about there. That year, my wife surprised me with a weekend rental of a backhoe loader for my birthday. What a lucky man I am to have a wife like that! She even had a bow on it.

I had an absolute blast! One of the many projects that weekend was to dig out that water hole and see if we couldn’t make a little pond out of it. As it turned out, every scoop of dirt I removed immediately filled with water.

**This is what the “Lake” looked like before starting the expansion**

My wife asked me to try to make it larger, so that was the day’s project, although this will take several days to complete – over the course of several months, due to almost constant rain. Argh!

Part 2

In Part One of this series, I started expanding the little pond we affectionately call “the lake”. On that first day, I managed to get a good bit dug out. But before I could dig out more, I had to move the pile of dirt I made back from the edge to have room to work, so that was the first task. Because of the near constant rain here, this was eight days after Part One.

**In Part 1, I managed to get this much more dug out**

Part 3

There’s been brief break in the almost constant rain so I took advantage of it to dig out our little pond more. It was still very muddy work!

There is a big rock next to those trees that I need to move out of the way. My new backhoe thumb would have been handy then! I could have just picked it up and carried it instead having to push and pull it around.