As a pond contractor who has been building water features for a number of years now, I’ve definitely developed a style. I usually try to keep my designs simple and very natural, so when I first got a look at the pictures of a property one of my clients sent me showing a wooded hillside, I was pretty excited that she was interested in a pondless waterfall.
At Living Water Landscape Service, we always start off with a phone consultation when we are in the beginning stages with a new client. After a very short phone conversation, we talked about example waterfall pictures she had sent. We discussed the interesting terrain in her backyard and had determined the approximate size of the pondless waterfall we might build.
We then talked about the budget. She shared with me a number she had in mind, and I explained that the preliminary ideas we had just discussed might go over her amount. This did not seem to concern her much. We decided to schedule an on-site paid consultation to figure out the details, prepare a proposal and put a firm price on the project.
When I arrived, we got right to work looking at example pictures and walking around the space to determine how the water feature and patio would be arranged. It only took about 30 minutes and some marking paint, and we designed a 35-foot-long pondless waterfall that would cascade down the hill and end right next to a 700-square-foot Travertine patio!
I wrote up the proposal with the scope of the work, and she agreed that everything looked great, and we would be a good fit to work together. She wrote a check for one-third of the total project, and we scheduled it for the beginning of July.
HOA delays pondless waterfall
As it sometimes goes with contracting, schedules change, and when we finally arrived to start the project, it was nearly a month later than anticipated. We had run into some delays on the previous project, but the big problem was the client’s Homeowners Association — that’s right, the dreaded HOA.
I heard that this particular HOA was one of the toughest to get approvals from. I also heard a rumor that at one time they did not allow new water-feature installations in this neighborhood. To try and ease the concerns of the board, I submitted an extensive design package.
It included a site-plan drawing, schematic drawings of a pondless waterfall and overhead views of the property with images marked showing where the property would be impacted. I even recorded a short video showing the layout of the property and explained how the system would work. The approval that we thought might take 30 days took a bit more than 60, but we got the full go-ahead!
Construction gets underway
Construction of the feature went smoothly. Materials could be delivered about 50 yards from the site, and getting rocks and gravel close was not a problem. Because the waterfall reservoir sits at the bottom of a steep hill, storm drainage challenges emerged. There were several swales, or depressions, in the landscape and surrounding woods that are used to usher stormwater down the hill to a lake. We needed to be mindful of how the water would move down the hill and use the landscape to limit the impact of storm drainage on the new water feature and patio. We worked around a 6-inch drain tie and two 4-inch lines that took water from the home’s gutters into the woods.
The reservoir for the waterfall is under the new patio, so we used a 6-inch drain there to allow the overflow to escape into the wooded area at the property’s edge.
The completed project
Within days of completion of the project, we experienced some good thunderstorms and heavy rainfall. All the stormwater management worked great, and some of it even topped off the reservoir.
In the end, our client ended up with a beautiful, nearly 40-foot-long pondness waterfall that fits seamlessly into the surrounding landscape.
