the fence

For the past two weeks Mr M and I have been carefully measuring, adjusting, measuring again, laying out posts, standing back and looking and then measuring and then eventually banging some posts in for our new fence. As I have mentioned before the house fence was non-existant on one side, meaning sheep were literally rubbing up against the weatherboards if they had an itch. We wanted to re-fence the whole yard, putting the fence on the other side of the driveway, way further out on the west side, out a bit near the shed/clothesline to make space for a few fruit trees and also out a metre on the east side to make space for our dog pens, chook pen and eventual veggie patch. Sounds easy right?!

So here we are with the trusty John Deere and the post rammer banging in some posts on the west side of the house (where the cypress trees used to be). Here you can see the little garden gate that we decided to put in as this stretch of fence is quite long with no access out into the paddock or down to the dam. We are going to use the existing little fence from the front of the house (see that here) which we will give a lick of paint. I quite like the idea of using original elements of someones home, so we're not completely butchering it or making it totally new.

As you can see above we hit a little problem early one morning with some over exuberant post ramming! It was an extra long and thick post and Mr M was thinking 'gee we've gone deep, it's pretty moist around here...' Uh yeah pretty wet because we've HIT A PIPE! After initial panic we discovered how to turn the water off to that area and found it was actually a pipe that did nothing and ran out into the paddock. Mr M actually quite glad he found it as he is now going to re-direct it to water my nearby fruit tree patch.

So first we measured out where we wanted our gates and therefore strainer assemblies would go, ran out a sighter wire to line up the posts against (so that the fence is dead straight) and strained that so it's nice and twangy! Then I measured out how far apart we wanted the posts, general rule of thumb about 4 metres, ours were about 3.5-3.8 metres depending on the stretch of fence, then I spray painted on the ground where I wanted to posts. It is then Mr M's job to drive the tractor up to the right painted spot with me guiding him, then I adjsut the rammer to the left/right to the right spot, he drops the rammer, I stand back to see if it's all straight and away we go. I again stand back to see if the post is going in dead straight from all angles, basically a lot of me jumping about yelling over the noise of the rammer/tractor and Mr M yelling back 'whaaaat?!!'



Here is our finished masterpiece. Well, on one side of the house. And without wires. But we're getting there, slowly but surely. It is quite rewarding work this fencing business, you kind of think you're getting nowhere but then at the end you actually have something to look at say 'yep I built that'! So all of that dirt patch which used to be where the trees/paddock were is going to be our big yard! Hurruh!

This weekend brings a lot more fencing. Going to put the wires on and see how we go, apparently it's meant to be a hot one so I think I will go and jump in the dam after a hard day's fencing!