Here's the tank when I just got it set it on the floor, 135 Gallons, and the current tank in the corner awaiting their new home to be setup, with lots of extra space.

About a week and change later I got my cousin to help me put the tank on the stand (heavy sumunabitch), cleaned the area up a tad to make it look respectable (which it looked that clean now!), the white powder on the right side is from a fluorescent tube that broke *sigh*

Ok water is filled up as high as it's going to go as I want to leave plenty of rooms for rock, just a tad of sand in so the rocks aren't laying on the bottom, a few base rocks in straight from hawaii! I have 120 lbs of them, those just cleaned off and tossed in a few.

Ok, having let the rest soak in the bathtub, I came to the conclusion they aren't going to get much cleaner so dumped them all in, guess they weren't very clean though!

Ruh Roh! Another broke, man these things are fragile when they fall 5 feet to the wood floor! I'm getting good at this, wonder how many years I took off my life with the mercury vapor from these guys.

Decided to buy some live rock from the local fish store, they just got in a new shipment, so I was able to apprehend some before they were allowed to screw it up any, here's the first piece, look at all the pretty coraline colors oooh. I got 4 pieces just to try and start the seeding of the base rock, about 22.5 lbs worth, but silly me just ordered a 90lbs box of Tonga Kaelini that I'll have in a few days *sigh* patience is a virtue.. oh well this rock is still cool, and wasn't TOO much more.

Here's a side view of the tank and the two rocks closest, the one on the right is a different angle of the previous picture, and the other is another, it has some lettuce looking macroalgae (aka seaweed)on the top, it looked a bit on the dry side, we'll see if it'll start growing, if not I'm sure any fish or inverts I put in might find it a tasty treat!

Here's a rather large one, looks like a boulder but actually has a huge hole in the center that I was expecting a mantis shrimp to come out and bite me! The backside is filled with holes too, a little bit of dead growth on this piece, but it'll grow back, and the crabs and snails will chew that stuff up for breakfast (when I eventually put them in).

Here's the last piece, man that piece was super porous, bubbles came out of the holes for a good 5 minutes before they stopped, lots of greenery on this though, its rather flat but I just had to put it upright because fun stuff was growing on both sides!

Here's a picture from the top of the tank of the last two rocks (one on left is boulder one on right is skinny airhead). To give a sense of scale that hose in there is 3/4" wide.

And on the 6th day he said LET THERE BE LIGHT! And so it was done. Still need to figure out plumbing and such before I cut holes out, but got some nice 10000k spectrum light putting a healthy glow in the tank.

Ok here's some live rock I just got, now curing in the tank Tonga Kaelini live rock

Well the tonga has finally cured, and the tank is completely cycled. I aquascaped the tank to try to make it look nice inside, with lots of caves and places to crawl/swim around. The cords and stuff are still arranged all over the place.

Here's the right side of the tank, as you can see pump just flopped on the ground, but I did make an homage to "Finding Nemo" by building Mt Iwannahockaloogi (right corner).

Here's the left side of the tank, I scraped the black paint of the back to let light in while the rock was curing, but I need to repaint it, in hindsight it would of been better to just leave it black.

Here's a shot straight through the tank, with Mt Iwannahockaloogi in the background, some of the coraline is getting bleached though because of the lighting, but it'll grow back.

Since the last pictures I have bought a cleaning crew, which constisted of 30 Cerith snails, 20 Margarita snails, 9 Mexican Turbo snails, 10 Peppermint shrimp, 2 Scarlet skunk cleaner shrimp (for the fishies to stay clean), and 41 dwarf hermit crabs (about 50/50 mix of blue legged and red legged), this all in addition to the 10 hermits & 15 Astraea snails from my other tank, as there is a bit of diatom growth that happens, so no big pictures until the cleaners do their job and make it look pretty again.

Also bought 6 Blue-Green chromis fish, they are fun because they school, although they are quite timid, and my tomato clown & blue damsel chases after stragglers, hope they survive.

Well that's the end of the initial setup, for the current status quo of the tank go to the tank history page one page back (use the back button on your browser, I am not going to make a hyperlink for you!).

The tank on a budget was a success, getting all the essential items, tank, stand, heaters, lights, live rock, sand, salt, some fish & corals etc, can be done for under $1000, this was a 135 gallon tank too! Granted the more difficult corals and such would need metal halide bulbs, alot more flow, possible a surge, but the essentials to having a nice tank are well within budget. This isn't to say there's no work involved, you have to be willing to wait patiently for the deals to come out of the woodwork, craigslist.org is a very good tool (but its a local one), a 135G tank alone would cost $300+ depending on quality, the cheapest stand would cost you another $300 (and this isn't oak or anything with a nice finish, I'm talking pine or particle board), considering the setup that came with the tank, stand (not a good one though), heaters, some pumps, right there would cost you easily $800 new. The rock was the pricest piece but again, you need to look around shop, normally from a LFS the amount of rock I got (AND QUALITY) would of easily cost $600-800, those of you who don't know saltwater mayy laugh at the concept of paying for rock.. but just think about that the next time you go through homedepot and imagine redoing some of your backyard with stone pavers. The end result is something that took about 4 months to complete (most of which was waiting for deals) so when you consider that the money gets spread out over time so its not a huge expense, how expensive you make it depends completely on you after you get it setup.