But after this minor victory, the tank went sideways on me. It started a minor algae bloom which turned into a major bloom with hair algae. That stuff is nasty and nearly impossible to get rid of. The best advice I could find was to starve it out by feeding the plants (which require more complex nutrients than algae) and turning off the light. Also, pull it out manually.

Well, the whole point of a giant tank is that I don’t have to do this manual labor stuff. The bigger they are, the better they tolerate adverse conditions. So I started looking for little critters and other conditions that would help. I found a place that said that ghost shrimp eat hair algae, which turns out to be true. The best part is that some of them are even smart enough to avoid the goldfish and have been munching on algae like crazy and helping keep the tank clean. The other thing I found was chemistry.

Turns out that I live an an area with super-soft water. As in it’s a miracle that plants grow here because the water is so soft. It doesn’t have enough mineral content to properly buffer the tank and keep the pH or the carbon content in line. I found some suggestions for getting the pH under control, but the low hardness and buffering capacity was going to continue to cause this hair algae explosion. So I added some baking soda and poof, problem goes away. There are little strings of algae in there now, but nothing like the jungle before.

Following other aquarists advise, I bought some cuttlebone for a long term solution. That’s supposed to help with the hardness and buffering issues. I’m aslo planning to buy a CO2 system at some point, but those suckers are expesive.

The hangup is the door for the center section. There must be a door, this is where all of the equipment will go. I don’t want to see canister filters and CO2 tanks, the workings of an aquascaped fish tanks are large and ugly. They detract from the simple beauty of the fish and plants. This center section was designed with an open back, to allow tubes and pumps and cables to run riot. How can I expose that muck to the world?

So, the door. The door itself is beautiful. It matches not only the side detail of the stand, but also the store-bought china cabinet and sideboard. (Does this design detail make me obsessive? Probably, but when visitors see it, the flow through the greatroom furniture will be amazing.) The trouble with this amazing door is that they don’t make hinges that allow inset cabinet doors to open when they’re recessed. So there must be a workaround that allows this amazing door to actually open.

It’s funny; the recessing of the door/shelves/drawers was in the original plans but none of the people working on this thought about the implications of this detail until I started looking to buy hinges. I tried every hinge I could get my hands on to see if they would work, ending up with the cheapest mega-retail-chain hinge because it seemed closest to what was required. I sure hope it works out and we can find a way to finagle the door around so that it opens. I’d hate for this one detail to turn out to be a deal breaker.

At this point, the stand is fully designed and mostly cut into the large pieces listed on the cut list. Final shaping and fitting has yet to be done. The door and drawer will be the last pieces cut and put together as they are not required before setting the aquarium on top of the stand.

Getting to this point has required the purchase of a bunch of new tools for my father. He managed to pick up a shiny new precision router table and a jig for doing the mortise and tenon joints. He swears that these will be useful later for his door building exercises, but I think he would have bought them even if they weren’t. He just likes buying new tools.

One of these days I’ll be redrawing the blueprint and posting the cut list. I would just scan the current one, but it’s so marked up it’s impossible to read. Getting the design onto paper and readable by someone else was more difficult than I’d thought. Items that are so clear to me require more explanation than I’d expected.

I’m still hoping to have this done soonish. There’s a great big plant auction at the local Aquarium Society that I’m hoping to take advantage of. But that means getting out to do the staining and shellacking soon, too. That’s going to be a project all by itself.

But this tank isn’t that interesting to me. I built it out mostly for my husband, who likes tropical fish. He likes the colors and the flash that you only get in warmer waters. I actually think these fish are unintelligent and have no personality. Of course, I could be prejudiced by the constant hiding. One of the cats is convinced she can get the fish by swatting the outside of the tank.

My favorite tank right now is the one that’s becoming a problem. I started with 3 goldfish in a 10 gallon tank, not realizing that they’re messy and will get enormous. As they grew, I had to invest in a larger tank. They’re down to 2 (one didn’t survive the move) in a 30 gallon. It’s planet with a few anubias and java fern, since those seem to be the only plants these two won’t eat. In fact, that’s the only thing they won’t eat. They’re now so huge, about 6 inches each, that we need a new tank for them.

So last month we went and bought a 120 gallon tank. We’re slowly gathering all the parts to put it together, and I’m going to aquascape this one thoroughly. I even have a layout in my head for all the plantings, after flipping through some amazing books on layout. I am very excited about this project.

But the best part? Tomorrow we head to the lumber yard to pick up wood to build the stand. We’re not buying a stand from the store, rather we’re taking plan for a generic stand and crossing it with the plan for the bookshelf we built. The melding of these two will give me a stand that has space for books AND all the aquarium stuff. The tank is even deep enough that the stand with have room to hold additional hardware, should I get the bug to go crazy on the plant maintenance.

Between the woodworking and the tank setup, I’m going to have lots to talk about over the next few months.

When they were still small: