The Big Decision

In some of mine and Blake's first conversations we soon found out we shared an interest in fish! Not to eat mind you, because that is one thing that I do not have a taste for, but as pets! It probably came up when I described my love for my current beta fish Swarly that I have had for coming on two years. Along with my past hundred plus fishes that I have had. Blake had a 30 gallon fresh water tank while he was a child and he loved it! We always talked about how cool bigger fish tanks are and how interesting we find them.
Then one day Blake decided why not start now? When we thought about it, we made the big decision to get a saltwater aquarium.  In our adventure to get a saltwater tank we decided it would be best if we put in the time before hand to know exactly what we were getting into. We then did a lot of research. I will be honest most of the research was done by Blake! I did love to hearing about it, and reading the articles or posts that he showed me. We even made it to a couple saltwater shops and what I soon discovered was saltwater fish tanks are so much work! I had to idea that it took so much effort to have a saltwater tank. You have to measure on a regular basis the temperature, Salinity, Ph levels, Ammonia, Nitrates Alkalinity, Calcium, Magnesium, Phosphates, the list goes on forever! This however did not deter our great project in the making!
The only problem was that every single person we talked to about how to start up our first saltwater tank had a different opinion, and all of their opinions were the only right one, or so they informed us. Our heads swimming with information we just decided that maybe everyone was right and we should just pick what we liked about everyone else's tanks. The only problem was that we had no idea what it was that we liked most about them all! To many choices!
So we went to the basics... the tank! Blake had a fresh water tank when he was much younger so we decided to just use that instead of spending an extra $150.00 on something that we already had! One Sunday Blake's parents Steele and Nancy were nice enough to have us up for dinner with his family and that is the day we decided to get the fish tank and bring it home with us! The tank was under the stairs in a storage area. It was quite the feat to get it unburied, but we succeeded and with the help of Blake's brother, loaded it into Blake's car to take home to his house. When we got home we decided to set it up just to see it all together. I am so excited to get this going I can't even stand it! This is a great picture of the tank with the stand! Even the sweet light on top from the 90's unfortunately we have to get a new light so it wont be as matching :)