I would like to surround my pond with a stone cover, mainly to make it look nice, but also to hopefully make it last longer. I was thinking of stripping the wood, but now I'm thinking of just covering it with stone so I don't have to disrupt the pond itself too much.
The top is just pond liner attached to the two-layered wooden wall, which has a layer of styrofoam insulation in between. I'd like to put a flat coping stone on top of this, but where I can potentially move it off in case I need to get to the inside. I'd like it to be strong enough to sit on though.
On the walls, I'd like to eventually put either some kind of premade stone cladding sheet, or else mortar some stones on the surface. I think it's less important to be able to move this eventually, although it might be nice.
What type of preparation could I do to make these surfaces ready for coping and cladding stones? I'm wondering if I can just mortar the stones to the walls, but for the coping stones I really don't have an idea what I can do to make it both flat and strong enough for the coping.
