And... We have a fence!

We've been taking a break from our room-a-week situation because we've been working on something big outside. (and we've just been all around busy, but let's just blame it on the out side thing...)

We have a FENCE!

Cor (and a few good friends) did a ton of work to get our 286 foot fence up for a whole-lotta-less-money than paying someone to do it. Plus we had an friend trade us some fencing material for some furniture. Win-Win.

Online estimates show our fencing would have costs us at least $3,000 and Cor got it done for about $1,000.

The first thing Cor did was rent a brush cutter and cleared out some of our property (we didn't fence in all of our property because we wanted to keep the woods in the back of our property line). After breaking one brush cutter, Cor and a friend moved on to measuring out the fence line and marking where post would be. Then they moved on to attempting to aug some of the big holes for the fence posts...

This didn't work to well. He had a two man auger (and a friend) and totally needed something different.

The good news was when he went to return the equipment, the company gave him a credit to rent the proper auger (and another brush cutter).

A few weeks later and the guys were back at it (now with an expert, my very amazing father-in-law.) Cor finished out clearing the hill and then they used a one man hydraulic auger (or so I'm told) to dig out the post holes. This looked super duper easy and took the guys no time at all. We've got a lot of tree roots. So that was fun.

A few holes in, the wise, experienced one, decided they should probably put up a few posts to make sure they measured everything out correctly... Surprise! They we're off by a few inches. But at least they only had dug a few post holes by then and could fix the rest of the work they had to do. Good looking out, Daddy-O.

A few more weeks later (hey now - free weekends are hard to come by when you have so many little humans!), Cor got back to work on the fence. He needed to cut 18in off of each post and measure from the bottom to make sure each rail would be where it needed to be. This required more math. Good thing we met in Middle School Pre Algebra and both aced it (Spoiler: We did not. Not even close.)

Once he got going, math seemed to make more sense and he got into a groove of cutting and setting the posts (and we he had 28 posts to set!) and adding in the rails (we have a split rail fence with 2 rails each).

On a whole other weekend (good fence building takes time, people.), he attached nylon coated metal netting to the inside of the fence. He used 1 1/4in galvanized metal fence staples to staple the netting into place. There were a few issues where we had hills and some creative patch working was needed, but for the most part, it was unrolling and stapling all along our fence line.

Then, with the finish line is sight, we ran out of netting.
Yeah.
We needed like a good 10ft.

And the store was sold out. (Looks like a lot of people buy fencing materials on 3 day Holiday Weekends. Who knew?)

We were able to use some of our garden fencing to block the bottom of the small section of fencing that is lacking the netting (and the area where a large gate will be put in).

Eventually we'll add two side gates and add netting to those too...

... but that's for another weekend.

Watch the Crazy: