We are putting a pond in the front garden and we want to form it with concrete walls. Since the concrete guy, John, will return in a few weeks to pour the garage floor and the driveway, we are going to try to piggyback the pouring of the pond walls with that concrete pour. To do this, we (or actually Peter) need to dig out the pond and create the concrete forms for the pond.
Today, we started the digging! Here is Peter with the first shovel full of dirt

and two shovel fulls later, Peter is ready to call it quits

Just kidding! Peter persevered and continued to dig for many hours creating this hole

I did pitch in a bit, but Peter did most of the work. And when we were finished for the day, we were not even half way done.

To give you an idea of how much more we have to do, we want the pond to be four feet deep and the shovel that is standing in the pond is four feet tall (including the handle). So we are not half way done.....
Fortunately for us, we have Hamish doing the finish carpentry work on the inside of the house (if I had to do it, we would not be nearly as far along). Hamish has built a beautiful structure to hide the portion of the stairs that project into the hobby room. I thought that the drywall was going to just be stepped down around these steps, but instead, Hamish has created a frame over the stairs so the drywall will slope along the stairs instead of stepping. It is hard to describe so here are some photographs.



This frame was very complicated to make. If you look closely, the slope actually changes in two directions because of the rotation of the spiral staircase so the frame changes slope and is slightly convex. I will be interested to see what it looks like after the drywall is installed.