A touch of Zen - our Rock Garden

Well, the exams are over and we finally managed to find some time to do up the open area on 4th Floor in the hostel.
Since the beginning of the year, my boarders and I have had the idea of turning this open space into a Rock Garden.
After some planning, we managed to source some white granite pebbles (Courtesy of Mr Lim Chap Huat, Old-Victorian-- Thank you Mr Lim for your continous support of VS)
The boys made a 'tactical' trip to the beach under the cover of semi-darkness to procure some sand.
Once they were back, Operation Rock Garden began.
First, we laid the borders with our pebbles.

While the boys laid the pebbles, I began assembling the water feature I had purchased earlier today. The goal was to line the area with pebbles and create two sand islands in the middle. Here you can see how we gradually transformed the empty space and filled it 'artistically' with rocks and sand.

By the time the sand was laid out, I had managed to assemble the pump and connect all the wiring without electrocuting myself or short-circuiting the entire block (phew!)

Zun, our 'secret agent' from the other floor, very sportingly agreed to help out as well! Here he is helping to sift through the sand-- looks like our pristine beaches in Singapore are not as pristine as we thought. Zun had to pick up everything from cigarette butts, leaves, etc to make sure the sand was fine and uniform.

While Zun was sifting through the sand, Fung Jin Jie was having an equally tough job of levelling the pebbles. As we poured the pebbles down, there were uneven patches that started to show up. So Jinjie's job was to get the pebbles levelled- tough one ar!What was I doing? Ah, donch worry, Mr Siow never 'keng' wan. I was assembling the fencing for the area. This was to help section our new garden area from the common study area.
Finally, after a few hours of back-breaking work, we managed to put everything in order.

I was very proud of the boys- in a short 3 hours, we managed to turn an empty open space into a nice rock garden!

The greatest credit should go to our 2 seniors- Chris Tang Boon Shiun and Ng Pei Xiang who did the bulk of the work and organised the rest of the juniors in ferrying the sand from the beach and layering the pebbles.

Well done boys!