This is the rewrite of a build log that I managed to lose all the images and data to on Reef-Central, so hopefully it'll stay around a bit longer this time
The original reason for starting afresh was disaster. The gorgeous hardwood floor underneath the existing tank had warped, and the subfloor was damaged too. This was a result of a small leak that (over a few years) just pushed too much water down into the floor, and it then expanded up to make a significant bump in the floor - large enough to trip over, in fact.
So, the obvious thing to do was to get a bigger fish tank, right ? And this time "do it properly". That means new floors (duh!), a self-contained fish-room, and an in-wall tank rather than a tank-on-a-stand.
I live in the Bay Area, CA, and housing space is somewhat at a premium, so the house isn't huge at some 1500 sq ft. That meant there was a problem: There was no space for such a thing because the sliding-doors that exit out into the back garden are in the way. The part of the house we're talking about (when the on-a-stand tank was there) looks like:
With some trepidation, I suggest to my darling lovely wonderful amazing wife (who's still thinking about her ruined floors) that we might want to ditch the french-doors, put up a wall that shrinks the living room, and generally let me have everything I want. Somewhat surprisingly, this went down well... We end up with something looking like:
A few things to note here:
The original reason for starting afresh was disaster. The gorgeous hardwood floor underneath the existing tank had warped, and the subfloor was damaged too. This was a result of a small leak that (over a few years) just pushed too much water down into the floor, and it then expanded up to make a significant bump in the floor - large enough to trip over, in fact.
So, the obvious thing to do was to get a bigger fish tank, right ? And this time "do it properly". That means new floors (duh!), a self-contained fish-room, and an in-wall tank rather than a tank-on-a-stand.
I live in the Bay Area, CA, and housing space is somewhat at a premium, so the house isn't huge at some 1500 sq ft. That meant there was a problem: There was no space for such a thing because the sliding-doors that exit out into the back garden are in the way. The part of the house we're talking about (when the on-a-stand tank was there) looks like:
With some trepidation, I suggest to my darling lovely wonderful amazing wife (who's still thinking about her ruined floors) that we might want to ditch the french-doors, put up a wall that shrinks the living room, and generally let me have everything I want. Somewhat surprisingly, this went down well... We end up with something looking like:
A few things to note here:
- You can see we're right up against the outside of the house, and in fact the one-car-wide driveway to the detached garage is on that side of the house as well, so there's absolutely no way to expand out in that direction
- The sliding doors have been removed, and we've converted over to a single door (we actually love this door now. Because only half the doorway was accessible before, we actually find it far easier to get large things in and out of the house)
- The tank. It's sticking out of the wall. No, that's not a mistake in the diagram
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