(Re) Building the Fence – Part 1

We usually spend Memorial Day weekend at the Pedaler’s Jamboree, a  bicycle/music festival/camping trip on the KATY Trail so imagine our surprise when we came home from work the Thursday before and saw that our back fence was gone. The neighbors’ fence had been leaning for a while and replacing it had been on our list but our neighbors had chosen that day to begin the removal, despite the fact they didn’t have a replacement plan. We jumped in, changed our plans, and headed to Home Depot for lumber.

As Jonathan removed the rest of the fence, I took advantage of the additional space to trim the large boxwoods and do some serious weeding. We started the project with a light rain but the temperature was in the high nineties by the time we really got started.

The original fence builder hadn’t set the posts below the frost line so they had all heaved out of the ground. Jonathan simply rocked them back and forth until they came loose. We used the existing holes and dug about 3 feet down with borrowed post hole digger (gas-powered, although we still had to use the old-fashioned one as well).

Mixing the concrete in plastic buckets was probably the worst idea we had.

The peonies were in full bloom so we picked one section as our walking path to minimize the damage. I’m not particularly worried–we pretty much ignore them and they bloom like mad every spring.

We were worried about Wyatt escaping but oddly enough, he understood where his yard ended despite the lack of a fence. When did our dog start behaving so well?

Jonathan battling the heat to finish the pickets.

By the time we were done, we had a huge pile of debris with no real plan to remove it. A week or so later, we found a local high school student to help us carry it all out to a construction dumpster.

Jonathan attached some solar powered lights to the fence and I trimmed our peach tree and moved the hammock to a shady spot–and all of a sudden, our backyard seemed twice as big.