Our fence started to fall down over the winter. Other than prop it up so it wouldn’t take out sprinkler risers if it fell, however, there wasn’t much time to deal with it until spring. Then spring finally came, and I was able to dismantle it safely. Then it was time to build a new fence, and that’s where the trouble began. At first I thought perhaps I could put fence posts in new places so that I wouldn’t have to try getting rid of the old concrete footings.
No such luck. With all the sprinkler lines and roots running through that area, it’s like building a ship in a bottle. There’s very few places to put fence posts except for where they already were. I broke a sprinkler line and a sprinkler head finding that out. I also spent most of three Saturdays removing the concrete where I wanted to put in new posts.
I will not say that concrete is as hard as rock. It’s not. I can break concrete…eventually. Rock, at least the kinds of rock I kept finding, mostly just laughs at my meager attempts to break it up. If I found a large rock my only choice was to dig it out. That’s not always easy when you find a nine-inch rock two feet down in a eight-inch wide hole.
This weekend I finally got five of the six posts in place. Adding to the fun was handling bags of concrete mix that weigh two-thirds as much as I do, but I managed. I still have one more post to set, and it will be an interesting challenge. A different challenge will be putting up the vertical fence boards while standing in a bush, but we’ll deal with that when the time comes.
Other fun fencing projects this summer include putting in a brand new section of fence across the deep end of our driveway. That’s an area currently six inches deep in gravel, so that will undoubtedly present some challenges as well, though I’m hoping once we get past that there’ll be few surprises. Yes, I’m in denial. There are three or four mature Chinese elms along there on my neighbor’s side of the fence, and I’m sure there will be some pretty good size roots to deal with.
Let the fun times roll!
C’mon Thom, you know that you were doing some different fencing. Just man up and do your time.