Don’t hire a pond enthusiast
I’m a bit older and have some back problems. We bought a house that came with a pond and it grew on us but it needed a lot of help. We basically needed the whole thing torn down, new liner, and put back together but a smaller footprint. There was an existing water feature which I’m sure when it was first installed 20+ years ago, it looked great but it was against the house and needed to be removed because I knew it was rotting the sill plate (it did).
Anyways I met a guy at the local pond store who was extremely knowledgeable about fish and ponds who said he works on ponds on the side, the pond store didn’t provide that service. He came out and looked at the ok d and said he could do everything for $2k. Day 1 the guy shows up with his teenage kids to work. This guy didn’t do shit, he basically sat around and ordered his kids to work. Now, there’s nothing wrong with that but these kids aren’t living on a homestead in Texas. They are urban kids never even saw a shovel before. Day 7 comes around and I just felt bad for this guy, I calculated the time and money and they were making about $12 dollars an hour and no where near done. I decided we had enough and told him they were done and didn’t have to do anything else.
I ended up grabbing two laborers who never worked on a pond before and the pond looks amazing. And it took them 8 hours to finish everything which included removing all the rocks again, carving out the pond a little better, and reinstalling everything. Should have done this in the first place.