I've been growing bored of my living room display tank. It's the only upstairs tank I have and isn't nearly as easy to do water changes on as my fishroom setup or my big display tank downstairs. I had some tangs, cyps and sand sifters, but being next to the hallway, I'd occasionally freak out a fish in the tank on accident and I swear they'd have a heart attack or something.
So I switched it back to malawian haps, but as a grow out:

A few months later, I found it not as interesting as I'd hoped and with the MCA auction coming, up, I found space for those fish in the fishroom and wanted to do something different. Anything *new*, just to do something different.
Come the day of the auction, it seemed like there might be enough plants there to make something happen. I'd considered doing a reef tank, but didn't want the high prices and more strict management potentially associated with it. A freshwater planted tank was similar perhaps, but more forgiving perhaps. But it's still unknown territory, as my previous attempts with a few anubias here or there typically failed. Plants didn't really grow and eventually algae took over.
So, I came home with a handful of anubias, but didn't really have a full plan in action just yet. I just attached them each to small rocks, recorded which were which types, and treated the tank for algae with H2O2. As a result, all fish were pulled. I'd had bad BB algae prior on the rockwork in the tank and on the filter, so I figured this was best to insure a good start. I'm also not sharing any nets, buckets, etc, with any fishroom tanks that have algae in a hope to limit any spreading to this tank.

So then I gave it a couple weeks to make sure the plants would make it before I went full scale into setting up a nice tank. Overall, they did alright. Some started to yellow. Doing more research, I hadn't ever previously realized that iron is necessary for plants - adding a liquid fert helped the plants shape up.
So I picked up a few more plants a couple weeks later and a pile of driftwood.


I was originally going to use rock instead of driftwood, but lacerock looks best IMO, covered with algae. Otherwise it looks a bit too much like concrete. I went with malaysian driftwood specifically, because in the past it's the only wood i've never had a problem getting to sink.

After hours of aquascaping I ended up with this:
