We did a pretty massive home remodel in 2002. Part of the process of getting a building permit was us agreeing that we would demolish our back deck (it's a long story involving the phrase "impervious cover", which those familiar with Austin will understand). My wife always hated that deck, so she saw this as a bonus. I saw it as a massive project waiting to happen, but the city of Austin is very picky about building permits, so I went along.

Our contractor (with my help) demolished the deck handily enough. It was mostly a matter of sawing off the support beams and cutting the rest into bits that would fit in the dumpster. The deck had been about 20 by 30 feet and its removal left a rather gaping wound in our back yard. To make matters worse, the contractors and their equipment spent a couple of months tromping over and over this ground, killing anything that lived on it and making into a big, ugly mud hole.

In the spring of 2003, we started the landscaping project that would turn the mud hole into something livable. The first task was to lay a stone walkway across the back of the house. It's a lot of work to put in a stone walkway properly. You have to think about drainage and balancing cut and fill and pouring enough of a base that the walkway won't crack and tilt. Also, I only had the time to lay fairly small sections at a time, which means I only needed small amounts of mortar at a time. That, in turn, meant that I had to mix all of it by hand in a wheelbarrow. It's not the hardest work in the world, but it's not easy. Finally, by the end of the summer, I had the walkway done.

We spent the rest of 2003 and most of the spring and summer of 2004 finishing up the landscaping of the mud hole. My wife had the idea that part of it should be a rock garden; which I thought was a great idea until it came time to bring in some of the boulders. We had to cut down a gate in the driveway to let the big forklifts they use to deliver boulders get into the back yard. Once the rocks were in place, though, they looked really good. We finished off by leveling most of the remaining area and putting in a combination of limestone slabs, big tiles and crushed granite. It came out pretty darn good, we thought, even though we were just winging it and neither one of us really knows anything about design or landscaping.

What you don't see in the picture below is what is to the left of the landscaped part. That corner of the square was left unfinished. Why? Because I had started to get the idea that I was going to create a fountain. Both of us loved the idea of a fountain burbling away on the patio, but we weren't sure just what we were going to create. I figured I had a while to think about it before my wife got tired of the unfinished section. After all, the mud hole was gone that was relief enough, no?

Well, I was right, I had some time. Not that much time, however, and I started getting pointed questions about "the fountain you're going to build". I sketched and planned and stared at the site for inspiration. I catalogued what we wanted from the fountain and what we didn't want. As part of that process, I discovered, to my amusement, that I really wanted to create a work of engineering that would outlive me.

This wasn't really hubris; I wasn't trying to build a monument to myself. But I've been an engineer all of my life and still never really been involved in a project that was meant to last. The closest I'd come had been a software installation that survived daily use for about eight years before it was replaced. Software just doesn't last. I wanted, for once, to engineer something that wasn't a throw-away. Once I decided this, a lot of the other decisions were made for me.

This new requirement meant that I wasn't going to dig some sort of hole and line it with a rubber mat and plant shrubs around it, like they do on HGTV (oh yes, we watch those shows all of the time). For a fountain that was going to last, I would have to build out of concrete and stone, nothing else lasts decades. It meant that no part of the fountain, like the pump, could be built in – everything that could wear out had to be replaceable. It meant that I had to think about erosion: the ground shifts in twenty or thirty years and I couldn't have the ground eroding out from under one corner of the fountain and giving it an excuse to crack. Oh, and it couldn't crack at all: the water would run out. Here's the area I had to work with; it's a quarter-circle about eight feet in radius:

Since I'm not much of a civil engineer and had no idea, for example, how much steel should go in the foundation or what kind of loads to expect or any of that, I had to plan to over-engineer everything and keep it simple. Also, there was just my wife and I to do the work. No step in the building process could take more muscle than the two of us had together (I came pretty near to breaking this constraint a couple of times – we just squeaked through once or twice). Two people can only pour so much concrete at a time, so the whole thing had to be broken into pieces of work we could reasonably do.

All in all, I think I spent about six months sketching and scratching my head before I was satisfied I could start. I tried to leave as many decisions as flexible as possible so that I could change my mind as the work progressed. When you don't have a clue as to what you're doing, you want to leave yourself as many options as you can. For example, I didn't know if some walls would be made of poured concrete or concrete block when I poured the foundation: I just knew where they would go and that, either way, I would have to have steel coming out of the foundation to tie them into the slab.

Finally, in spring of 2005, I broke ground. The rest of this series will show the steps and process that finally, by October 2005, led to a finished fountain. Partly by pure dumb luck and partly by my habit of spending hours staring at the project trying to think of every possible consequence, we managed to create a result that pleasantly exceeded our expectations.

Be warned though: do it yourself projects of this magnitude are not for the faint of heart. I suspect I spent about 200 hours on this project – much of it in hard labor.

Note: this entry is part of a series called "The Fountain Project", which contains the following entries:
     The Fountain Project
     Foundation
     Walls
     Taking Shape
     Finish Work
     Last Touches
     Safety Tips