I don't know how deep your pond is, but you can cut a piece of screen the size of your tub and cover it with nylon hose. Support it all around the tub, so that it doesn't touch the pump. Leave an inch or 2 between the pump and the screen. You will have a larger area, it will take longer for it to clog. You can also use a product that causes the particles to clump togeather. Regardless of what you do, you are going to have to clean that filter sometimes. Janie

Tox I would like to know just what you consider clay. If I have a wet spot and till it, clay acts just like the stuff you used to by as a kid, gummy sticky and impossible to work as all you get a large balls of wet muddy clay. If you wait till spring and turn it over wet, when it drys you are fighting the equivalent of large dryed bricks that breaking to small dried bricka and turn a two hour job into a four hour job. I have dealt with this stuff since I was a kid and my father said I could help him in the garden. I made the mistake of turning the leaves into the wet garden one spring, as my dad said never to do(I actually did it again twenty years later, and by golly same misery) and spent the rest of the summer dealing with chunks of wet leaves and dirt instead of crumbly soil. I don't think you have ever dealth with heavy clay or black gumbo as it is called here and when you get below the black gumbo there is yellow clay that is twice as bad. I have the advantage that in the veg. garden I have worked in so many yards cubed of leaves, straw and weed piles three feet high and sheep manure that it is now the same dark brown color of my hair when dry, but in the rose garden all that has been added is left over leaves, Eucalytus mulch and now cocoa beans that the stuff is black as the ace of spades (when a chunk dries and breaks open it is actually a dark gunmetal grey-black, and when I roto-tilled between the rose bushes because I was annoyed that when I stuck a three sixteenth inch diameter weeder into the soil to get a big dandelion it would bend the weeder) I now have a weed free rose garden with ground that consists of thousands of inch to half inch diameter balls, for lack of a better description, but the roses are damned healthy.

Hello, We are in North Western NJ and just completed our vinyl pool project. We are very happy with our PB and would definitely recommend them. About the additional excavation costs, we were told up front that if they were to encounter anything unusual it would be additional. Best of luck. I am sure you will find incredible information on this forum. We certainly did.

Ok, wasn't gone that long. In the meantime, could you put your sofa on angle toward the tv? Just line it up with the rug. Take your leather chair and place it along the short side of the rug next to the window. If your small table will fit in the corner of the sofa and chair that would be a good place for it. Oh, and if what I think I'm seeing next to the tv(stacked suitcases) you could put those in that corner instead. The decorative key might look good above the cut out to the kitchen...hung long ways. Take down the art print on the wall next to the cutout and arrange a collection of your photos. Try not to go hang any higher than the the print currently is and have the bottom of your last frame hit below the height of the bottom of the cutout. I know this isn't what you were asking for, but while you're planning room layout and the more permanent direction you want to go in...there is no reason you can't try something different with what you have right now.