Rosanky, TX 1.5 Acre Pond Rebuild: From Mud Hole to a 15 Foot Deep Lake in 13 Days

The before photos show what the owner had been calling a pond: a few feet of water in a weed ring, in a clearing in the post oaks outside Rosanky. It never held, it never ran over its spillway, and it sat where the creek and the watershed could not feed it. Thirteen days with a Komatsu D71 and a Cat 325 turned it into a 1.5 acre pond 15 feet deep at center with 4 to 1 banks, built where the water actually goes. It is the largest pond we have documented on this site, and it took two pump-outs from flash flood rains to finish. This page shows the ground before, during and after, and what the thirteen days cost.

Wide drone view of the completed 1.5 acre pond at Rosanky Texas, the full basin and dam cut into the woods, dry and ready for the first big rain

A pond in name only

From the air the old pond is easy to find: a small puddle with a green ring of weeds around it, the last of the rain sitting in the low spot of a clearing in the woods. It had three things wrong with it, and any one of them would have been enough. It did not hold water, so whatever ran into it left through the floor. It never ran over its spillway, which on a Texas pond means it never filled. And it was dug where the creek and the watershed on the property could not reach it, so it was waiting on rain that fell directly on it and nothing else.

That is the most common kind of failed pond in Bastrop County: dug where it was convenient rather than where the water goes, in sandy ground, and left to prove itself. The owner did not want it patched. He wanted a pond that would hold for decades, and on this ground that meant starting over on the site, not the hole.

Building it where the water goes

The rebuild was sited to use the creek and the watershed the old hole had ignored, and the footprint opened up to an acre and a half to catch what they deliver. That expansion ran into the trees, so the job started with clearing: the during photos show the cleared timber piled at the edge of the cut while the basin took shape behind it. From there the Cat 325 dug and the D71 pushed and shaped, taking the center down to 15 feet and cutting the banks to 4 to 1 all the way round, the standard slope on our price list.

Fifteen feet is deep for a private pond, and it is the point of this one. A pond on sandy Central Texas ground loses water to evaporation every summer no matter how well it is built; depth is what keeps a full pool through a dry August and keeps the water cool enough at the bottom to carry fish. A basin this deep with banks this consistent is what the owner meant by decades.

Thirteen days, two machines, two pump-outs

A job of this size runs on two machines. The excavator does the digging, loads the dozer with work and cuts what the blade cannot, and the dozer moves the yardage, builds the dam in lifts and track packs the floor and the banks. The seat photo is the D71 pushing the basin floor, the fresh cut rising to the banks on both sides.

What the day count does not show is the weather. Twice during the thirteen days a flash flood rain filled the cut, and twice the crew pumped it down before the machines could go back in. That is the reality of building a pond on a working creek in a wet spell: the site does exactly what it is designed to do, before you are ready for it. It is also why a pond this size is quoted in days with the weather in it, and why the price on this page is the number the job actually ran to, not the number it would have run to in a dry month.

What it cost

The job ran $50,000 to $55,000 for thirteen days on site with the D71 and the 325, transport included. Our price list starts a new acre and a half at $33,800 for six feet of depth on a four to one bank, over seven to eight days. This one is more than twice that depth, which is a great deal more dirt to move, plus the clearing for the expansion, working around an existing hole, and the two pump-outs. That is the difference between the list price and the number, and every part of it was on the quote before the machines moved.

No bentonite went into this one. On Bastrop County sand the seal question goes either way, and the site walk settles it before anyone quotes. When the ground needs it, the bentonite page has the calculator; the pond rehab guide covers what a rebuild like this involves, and the Rosanky pond page has the local ground and the price list.

Pond or lake

At an acre and a half of surface and fifteen feet at center, this is lake-sized water for a private place, and it is the biggest pond we have documented. It is also, in the ways that matter, the same job as the half acre rebuild at Lockhart and the half acre rehab at Paige the same month: an existing pond that did not work, taken back to the ground and built right. The difference is scale, and scale is days. Rosanky is not the first job we have run on this ground either; our 159 acre solar clearing at Rosanky sits a few miles away.

If you have a tank that has never done its job, the bucket test tells you whether it is leaking, and a walk tells us whether it is sitting where the water goes. Those two answers decide whether you need a seal, a deepening, or, as here, a new pond on the right spot.

Before and after

Land clearing around Rosanky

We work the country around Rosanky regularly, across Bastrop County and the counties next to it.