New fence...

If there's one thing I've learned over the years of renovating and pretending to be a gentleman-farmer it is this - if you put up something "temporary" and it works for any length of time, it becomes permanent... Which brings us to today's topic -

When we moved in more than five years ago, we fenced off our horribly overgrown side yard. It was a veritable jungle of blackberries and six foot tall canary grass. We let the goats have a go at it for about a year and then we pulled up the fence posts and "temporarily" fenced off the true pasture. This spring our "temporary" fence finally gave out. Four years worth of sheep and goats pushing against the tired raspberry posts caused a number of them to snap off at ground level. We moved animals around and pounded in metal tee posts to hold things up "temporarily" but the shine wore off that rather quickly.

About two years ago Grace bought a bunch of surplus treated 4x4's from a local Habitat for Humanity project. She also bought a plethora of 12+ foot 1x6's from a now defunct lumber yard. We had all the materials we needed to proceed. Now we just needed to get motivated. Once the temperature climbed above 80 degrees on a daily basis we figured it was time to get out there and put up a new fence. (It would just be wrong to tackle a task like this under comfortable conditions...)

We de-stapled the old fence from its posts. We coaxed the few remaining unrotted posts out of the ground. (Surprisingly enough, they were back-breakingly solid...) We rented an auger and auged (that's right, I said "auged" - deal with it) our post holes. We fought over how the fence should look - level all the way across or parallel with the lay of the land? (We went with the "lay of the land" option.)
We went to the local gravel pit and filled our utility trailer with 5/8's crushed gravel to tamp around the posts. We ran a line so that we could get our permanent fence in a somewhat straight line. (We had "eyeballed" our "temporary" fence and apparently someone needs to get a stronger prescription for their glasses...) We got the posts all set in a fairly straight line and then proceeded to nail boards on after a brief discussion as to whether it should be a "three" or "four" rail fence. (Three.)

It's not quite done - but it's well on its way! We have it to the point where it will keep animals contained (with the exception of baby goats...)

(I seem to have packed on a few pounds...)

I'm going to start on some gates on Monday - and then our days of chasing animals all over the yard and stepping over the fence to get into the pasture will be behind us.

Progress report...

I noticed that it has been almost two months since I've posted anything about our addition endeavors. That's not because we haven't been doing anything - it's just because I haven't posted anything.

Here's what the exterior of the house looks like now. By carefully arranging the angle and strategically overlooking other things, we fixed it so that you might get the impression that we are all but done based on this shot.


It does look nice. We're very pleased with the way it's looking and truthfully there's not a whole lot more exterior-ish stuff to do. This is pretty much what it's going to look like when everything is finished. At least as far as the outside is concerned....

The inside is a different story. We framed up the interior walls, got the rough electrical done, we're starting on the rough plumbing, and have generally picked away at stuff. We're happy - we're not in a huge rush or anything.

The project is not as all consuming this summer - now that it's all enclosed we're taking a much more relaxed approach to things; which is nice.

Once we get the rough plumbing done we can have it inspected and then we move on to insulation and dry wall. Then it will look like we're really making progress! Stay tuned!