So last weekend, I started by getting rid of most of the fish at the PVAS auction. Gone are the Angel, one of the rainbow sharks, the swordtails, and all the guppies. The other rainbow shark went into the 75g downstairs, where he seems quite happy, thought he is harassing the two SAEs in there. The Golden Wonder Killifish went into the 20 high. The girls (my wife and daughters) would not let me get rid of Plucky, our 12" long pleco, so we kept him and the corys.
Yesterday, I started the transformation by draining a third of the water into a 35 gallon rubbermaid container I picked up at Walmart for $10, then managed to catch the corys and plucky. I didn't have a net large enough to fit his whole body, so I manuevered the net over his head, and then grabbed his tail. He froze up when I did this, which made it surprisingly easy to transfer him.
Then I drained the remaining water, scooped out the beautiful gravel, removed the undergravel filter, and added more water back to the tank so as to rinse out all the fish poop. That took a surpringly long period of time, there seemed to be a lot of fish poop.
Then I laid down a 1" layer of ecocomplete, followed by a mound of fluorite in an island shape. I wanted to do a central mound-type layout, but slightly off center, so the Discus would have a large swimming area on one side, and so Plucky would have a nice hiding area in the right back corner. As you'll see in the pictures below, after planting, it ended up a little more like a triangular layout, but it achieves its purpose.
I used driftwood (instead of rocks, because I didn't have any appropriate rocks) to outline the edges of the island, then planted the two crypt usteriana plants. Then I added more ecocomplete, and planted the c. spiralis along the back, anubias nana "eyes" on the left, c. wendtii around the middle, an amazon sword near the right front, and attached a really nice Tropica Java fern that I got at the PVAS auction to a piece of driftwood, and placed it on the far right.
Finally, I capped all the unplanted substrate with 3M ColorQuartz black sand, to look like the sea surrounding the island.
Here's the full tank shot:
And here's a closer-up shot of Plucky's Island:
Now that it's planted, I realize I don't like the amazon sword where it is, and probably should have put c. pontederiifolia or moehlmannii in its place, but I'll leave it for a while to see how it grows out.
Any and all comments, suggestions, and/or criticisms are welcome!
By the way, I have a 5 gallon bucket full of gorgeous pink, blue, and white gravel that's available to anyone for free!
I'll even throw in the 5 gallon bucket.
sounds kind of weird, i too had a hard time giving up my synodontis eupterus that was just eating all the small fish including corie cats 
