Over the weekend we installed the duck house! That seems like such a momentous milestone, I’m going to split it into two separate blog posts.

Firstly, I took the footing blocks and floor joists to the site, and determined the positions by temporarily resting the blocks on top:

I then dug out the bank of the pond a bit, repositioned the pond liner, and moved some of the rocks, to work better with the duck house:

Here’s a view from the pond cam of me wading in the pond, moving rocks. The pond is about 2 feet deep at that point, with a steep slope up to a small shelf at the edge:

Here’s the adjusted pond edge:

I then dug in the concrete footings, using the level to make the floor joists flat:

Here’s the footings & floor joists in their final position, with the footing holes filled in. There’s only about an inch of clearance between the joists and ground, as I wanted it to be as low as possible so the ramp into the pond doesn’t have to be any longer than necessary. The ramp will later be attached to the angled board at the front:

A view from across the pond:

Next, I added scraps of wire hardware cloth to help keep small animals from going under the house. It won’t stop burrowing creatures like moles, but it’ll help:

The hardware cloth was stapled onto the inside of the boards, for tidiness, and buried a bit underground:

The final footings & floor joists:

Next up: bringing over the house itself. Stay tuned!

Over the last week or so, in between paying work, I’ve been doing a different aspect of the duck house project: landscaping and earthmoving at the pond edge.

Here’s where the duck house will go, between these two rocks. So of course all these plants needed to be moved:

In order to make a path to the duck house, we also wanted to take out a very leaning and half-dead tree:

So I used our chainsaw to chop it down and chop up the pieces:

The tree removed, and starting to excavate around it:

I moved the irises and such to next to the path location, as indicated by marker spray paint:

To get the wheelbarrow over the stream, I made a temporary bridge out of a pallet:

Later, I will make a nice arched bridge over the stream. Stay tuned for that project!

(The stream pump is usually turned off, since it loses a lot of water, but we turn it on occasionally.)

With the plants out of the way, I started excavating. I want the duck house to be as close as possible to the pond water level, so the duck ramp doesn’t have to be too long or steep. So there was a lot of dirt to dig out:

More excavating. I did it all by hand; I could have hired someone to do it, either manually or with heavy equipment, but there’s a certain satisfaction to doing it myself, as silly as that is:

Here’s a camera view of me digging:

Getting close to the desired level. I marked the planned location of the duck house:

Excavating the path:

Those many barrowloads of dirt had to go somewhere. I put some in the chicken run grazing box, and some elsewhere, but the majority of it went onto the back lawn, to fill in the numerous holes and bumps, left from when the veggie garden used to be there, before a previous owner moved it. Once I’ve finished the excavations, I will add grass seed to the dirt:

It’s me!

Contoured dirt for the path; we’ll wheel the duck house down this slope when moving it into place:

More of the path space; later I will add gravel to the path:

Looking down towards the pond:

The flat(ish) area next to the pond, with the duck house location marked:

Next up: installing the duck house!