The Indoor Pond

22 Saturday Oct 2011

Posted by SaraS in Backyard

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

Building Projects, Gardening, Plants, Ponds

The pond this fall

A bird's eye view of the pond when Renee was painting

One of my favorite features in our backyard is our cool pond. Renee built it years ago (she dug it out by hand!) before I met her. We have a cool little bridge that goes across it, and lots of plants and fish. We mostly just put varieties of goldfish in there, although we’ve lost a few here and there (several to a heron this past summer! Dang heron!)

Pond in springtime

We also have a really nice variety of plants in there — lilies (the lily pads always make me think that we should have a few frogs), parrot’s feather, water celery, and many more. I think I drive Renee a little nuts sometimes because I’m always forgetting the names of the plants and asking her what they are — usually when her mind is busy on some project or another so she can’t remember.

One of my favorite pictures of our lilies

Anyway, the fish can actually hunker down and live through the winter as long as we keep the water filter running. The top of the pond freezes up, and long icicles form around the filter / waterfall, but the pond is deep enough that the fish can semi-hibernate and make it through the winter. We do have to keep the water level up; I find it a little odd to be out there with the hose topping it off in the middle of January!

Lily pads and fish

The plants, on the other hand, cannot survive the winter. In past years, Renee just bought new ones every spring to restock it. This year in particular we ordered a few varieties online because PetSmart stopped stocking them. Several of these plants are tropical or semi-tropical, so they don’t much care for Montana winters.

Last Year: Saved a Few Plants

Last year, we came up with a plan to save some of our pond plants over the winter in the greenhouse area. This is the little extra room back behind the cats’ apartment that has semi-transparent roofing and walls to let in lots of light.

It was a fairly simple setup: two large plastic tubs (one taller than the other) full of water in the greenhouse area. But the water needs to circulate, since sitting in stagnant water would not be good for the plants.

So one chilly evening we ran around to a couple different stores, describing what we were looking for. I should say, Renee described what we were looking for, because she already had a picture in her head of how to set this up. I was just sort of along for the ride. It took trips to both Home Depot and then Quality Supply to find the right-sized pipe fitting.

Lily pads hanging in there in a makeshift winter home

We drilled a hole in the larger tub and installed the fitting so that it sort of stuck out over the smaller tub. Then we filled the tubs up with water and used a small pump to send water from the smaller tub back to the larger tub. So the water in the larger tub would drain out into the smaller, then flow back in via the pump. As long as we kept the water levels up, we had a nice little waterfall keeping the water circulating.

This mostly worked, and in the springtime we moved the plants back into the pond. Not all of them made it, so we still needed to buy more, but at least some of them did survive the winter.

Problems

We did run into a few problems with this solution.

Cheap Plastic Storage Tubs are Not Meant to Store Water!

For one, the plastic tubs were not designed to withstand the weight of many gallons of water. The larger tub started to bow out, which over time might have sent water sloshing over the sides. Renee fixed this in a temporary fashion with some scrap wood; she built a sort of rough frame around it to hold it in its original shape.

Frozen Plants!

Cold!!

Our other problem happened on November 22. That night, we had cold, cold weather with blizzard-like winds. The next day the weather forecast was for more cold (a high of 8). When we checked on the plants, the water in the tub was all frozen up.

We got a small portable heater to warm up the greenhouse (similar to the one we use in the cats’ apartment). This thawed out the frozen water. Some of the plants didn’t make it, but most of the lilies and some of the parrot’s feather did survive.

This Year’s Goals: Save Even More!

So this year, we wanted to improve on this and hopefully save more of the pond plants and some of the other non-water plants. We already had the heater ready to go, and we had cleared a lot of stuff out of the greenhouse area while working on the cat’s room before. The greenhouse also had the same new roof that the cats have. We had planned on this by using the semi-transparent skylight panels over nearly the entire greenhouse. The panels made it nice and bright in there.

The Solution

The indoor pond in progress

So this year, Renee took indoor pond to the next level and built a great winter home for the pond plants. She used more scrap lumber (although she did have to buy a few 2×8’s) and constructed a nice big wooden box. The box is sized to just fit on the counter in the greenhouse room. In fact, we had to get an extension cord with a flat plug on it to plug in the water filter; she didn’t leave enough room to allow a normal plug to stick out.

The next question is, how do you make a wooden box watertight? This part was simpler than I imagined. She used a large sheet of pond liner material. This material feels sort of like heavy inner tube material. It is the same material you use when you actually construct an outdoor pond.

She also added a shelf in the box to elevate some of the plants that prefer shallower water.

She setup the filter within the large box so it draws water to one end, sends it back in a hose, and re-enters the box at the other end.

Parrot's Feather

The shallow box of water plants

Once she started filling this with plants, she realized she needed even more room. So she built a second box for the other counter in the room (the counters form an “L” shape). This one is also a bit shallower. We still need to put in a second filter to circulate the water in this one as well.

Geraniums soaking in the heat

It is now a little crowded in the room, because we have some non-water plants temporarily hanging out on the floor. The second room of the greenhouse is also currently crammed full of plants.

More non-water plants taking up all the room!

But, overall, the end result is much nicer than last year. It reminds me a bit of the displays we’ve seen at the pond supply store here in town where we’ve bought plants before. So far, the pond plants look happy in their winter digs. Hopefully this year, more of the plants will survive for “transplanting” back into the pond in the springtime.

Rusty’s Doghouse

16 Sunday Oct 2011

Posted by SaraS in Dogs

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

Building Projects, dachshund, roofing, wiener dogs, Winter

Susan is a groomer who works with Renee at Quick Paws. She has an eight-year old dachshund named Rusty. I believe she has only had him for a year or two, so she adopted him as an adult dog.

Anyway, Rusty has a problem with damaging her apartment while she is gone to work, so he currently can’t be indoors alone while she is gone. With the weather turning colder, this was getting to be a big problem.

Renee came to the rescue by building Rusty a cozy, well-insulated doghouse last weekend. We have many of our own projects that need to get done, but this is one that really made a difference for one cute little dog. The project had the added benefit of using up numerous leftover building materials

Renee did most of the work on this one herself; I only helped out towards then end, when we wrapped things up with the roof. Unfortunately I didn’t get many pictures of this project in progress.

Framing the House and Building Walls

Renee used scrap wood to build a frame for the dog house. She designed it with a little peaked roof, sort of like Snoopy’s house. Since this is for a little dog, she ripped the scrap 2x4s (that is, cut them longways) for the frame.

Birdmouth cuts in the rafters

She did nice little birdmouth cuts for the rafters.

Then she cut foam insulation to size and placed it in the frame. At this point, it would have looked like a little house with white foam walls. She then covered up the sides with the leftover OSB sheathing.

View of the interior with lots of insulation

https://muddypoodles.files.wordpress.com/2011/10/insulation.jpg

Insulation still exposed before all the sheathing was installed

Cutting the opening

She cut a small opening in the front for the door with a jigsaw, keeping it small to keep as much heat inside as possible.

Weatherproofing the House

Tar-papering the walls

This house needs to be nice and watertight to keep Rusty warm and dry. We had leftover tarpaper from the Great Cat Room Remodel. So she cut pieces of that and used the staple gun to attach them to all sides of the house, as well as the roof.

But a good well-built house needs good, attractive siding. Fortunately we had a big stack of cedar planks that served well as siding. She attached these using long screws.

The old Grizzly Fence countertop that provided the wood for Rusty's dog house

The wood siding was another recycled material. Renee started grooming at Quick Paws back in the spring of 2010. At the time, Quick Paws had just moved into their new location, which used to belong to Grizzly Fence. The room that was to become the groom shop had a large, old countertop covered with cedar fence pickets. We pulled all those old pickets off and removed the countertop to make room for grooming, but Renee anticipated that this wood might come in handy and saved it.

These cedar pickets were substantial, so adding them as siding quickly made the whole house very heavy.

Roofing and Finishing Up

Finally, the house needed a good roof. Unfortunately, we didn’t have any more of the Ondura roofing panels from the Great Cat Room Remodel. We had already donated the leftovers to Home Resource.

So we ended up going back to Home Resource and buying some regular house shingles. We actually bought more than we needed, but it was only $5. They charge $1 per vertical inch of shingles, so I guess we had a 5-inch tall stack of shingles.

The advantage is, this would make the dog house look more like a real house.

I helped with the roof. I was a little surprised to find myself pounding roofing nails again…I had really thought that the cat room remodel was the end of my roofing career. At least for this one there was no danger of slipping and falling off. Although I did have to stand on my toes to reach the nails up near the top of the ridge.

Shingling the roof

Working with the shingles was pretty easy. They were already the perfect width for the little house, so I just laid them on one after another, starting from the bottom. After placing the first shingle, overlapping the next one covers up the nails, so the whole roof looks nice.

Ridge cap from the side

For the top, we used more shingles to create a ridge cap. The ridge cap is intended to cover the joint where the two sides of the roof meet. There are pre-made ridge caps you can use, but we decided to do the basic version. For this, I cut the shingles into 7-inch strips. Then I installed them along the top of the roof, similar to the way I installed the regular shingles. Again, adding and overlapping each new shingle over the previous one hid the previous nails. When I finished, I thought it looked a little funny because the shingles were still very stiff. However, once the house sits out in the sun and heat, the asphalt shingles should soften and “relax” a bit.

Ridge cap from the front of the house

While I worked on the roof, Renee added trim pieces around the door and on all the corners to hide the seams. We were out of the old Grizzly Fence wood by now, so we used some pickets leftover from installing our own fence last summer.

At last, the house was done! The rough wood planks gave it a nice “rustic” barn look, and I happen to think that the shingles look great.

The finished house!

Back view of the finished house!

Front view - I love the trim around the door!

Delivering the House

When we finally finished, the house was so heavy we had to back the truck right up to the workbench so we wouldn’t have to carry the house very far. We slid it up on the tailgate and carefully drove to Susan’s house; she lives just down the street so it wasn’t a very long drive.

I should have brought my camera but completely forgot. Susan and her roommate were completely blown away by the dog house. I think Susan was amazed that Renee had built something so cool over one weekend! They found a nice spot for it right by the back door.

Later in the week, Susan told Renee that Rusty loves the new house. He goes out in the back yard, does his business, and goes right into the the little house.

So I would say the Rusty’s Doghouse project was a big success!

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