We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.

While waiting for the contractor to show up for phase 2, we began building the first three gardens.  I started by outlining the what we wanted by using a stick in the rocks.

The patio was all Marie. She wanted another nice seating area made from colored bricks. So we drove off to Menards to see what they had. We played around with different ideas, knowing only that we wanted it to be about a 7x7 square.
After deciding on the type of brick, we then played with the various sizes, and created the rectangular pattern that we would repeat over and over. I made some quick calculations to determine how many of these rectangles we would need, and therefore, how many blocks 

For the bridge that will eventually cross over the waterfall, I once again first designed it using existing imagery that I copied and pasted together. Not as pretty as what Marie would do with Google Sketch, but it worked.

When we brought the contractor back to finish the wall, I was surprised at the cost. It was considerably more than the first section, but also much longer and taller. As I mentioned in the Wall Part I, the maximum safe height of a sitting wall is 3 feet. Well, due to the slope of the yard, this one is actually over 4 feet tall in the corner. so we may have trouble with that piece at some time.

With the wall finished, I quickly became tired of looking at the mess within the wall. So we started on the waterfall. Marie started it by sketching out the design on paper. The original design had a hot tub in it, but that wasn't put in.

Digging out the creek was pretty easy, as I only had to dig about 10 inches down. We had already decided to make what's called a disappearing waterfall, where the water just "disappears", instead of having it spill into a small pond. We had a pond when we lived in California, and didn't want the hassle of maintaining a koi pond. Marie was also afraid they would die in the winter. 

I had calculated that I would need a maximum of 90 gallons, from the time the water left the sump, to the time is would drain back into it. Add in an additional 20 gallons to keep the pump under water, and I would need 120 gallons of storage. That comes out to be 2x2x4. 

The electrical and plumbing is the part that scared me the most. I have no idea what is required by code, but I made sure I bought stuff that was certified for outdoor wet areas.  We'll start by tapping into this outlet.

With the waterfall done, we began working on the adjoining flora. We started by building a narrow garden on each side of the waterfall. The West side (right) was built to cover as much of the retaining wall as possible. In reality, they're both actually a single garden that wraps around three sides of the waterfall. 

One of the things we did that I haven't yet mentioned was having a tree cut down that would've been in the way of the second wall. We paid the contractor to cut it down just before installing the wall. They cut out any roots that were in their way, but left everything else. So the last thing we did for the year was to dig out the trunk and roots