Nate's Fence

2006.06.17

Nate and his next-door neighbor replaced the fence between them earlier this spring.  After finishing that project, Nate was inspired to rip out the chain-link fence which enclosed the rest of his yard.  Besides being ugly, it was not entirely effective in containing Kodi, their German Shepherd.

I had Nate dig through his computer for a couple photos showing the old chain-link fence.  These are from a year ago, when they bought the house.

The new side fence looks good.  Nate plans to do a similar fence along the front of the yard, with gates across the driveway, so that the entire yard will be enclosed.

Today I went over and helped Nate sink some posts along the front.  But first, we had to transplant a large rose bush which was sitting right about where the corner post needs to be.  Nate and Yuki tied it up with some heavy string, and then Nate and I dug around the base.  The roots didn’t go as deep as we thought they might, but we did have to chop off a couple 1/2″ diameter ones, which concerned me.

There were some fat juicy worms squirming around after we dug up the rosebush (Yuki was decidedly unimpressed).  We set the rosebush down on a tarp temporarily, while we dug out a spot for it in a half wine barrel planter nearby.

After moving the rosebush, it was time to work on the fence.  In a somewhat dubious effort, we attempted to measure the setback distance from the center of the street in order to figure out where to put the fence.  After a couple false starts, we settled on a location and drove in some stakes to mark it out, with a string line running between them.

When Nate had gone to Home Depot to get the posts, the only ones they had were twelve feet long.  So I brought over my circular saw to cut them in half.  While I was working on that, Nate started digging the first post hole.  Then we leveled the first post, staked it to hold the position, mixed up some concrete, and poured that in.  So far, so good.

But after that, things started getting more questionable.  Our string system wouldn’t stay taut unless one of us held it, but then we needed both of us to hold and level each post while driving the stakes in and screwing them to the post… and so we ended up with a less-than-straight set of fence posts.  As each hole was not quite the same depth, and the ground slopes along the front anyway, they were not even close to being the same height either.  So we were somewhat disappointed in our amateur work, but it was late in the day when we finished up with the posts we had.

After all that, Nate was kind enough to follow me back to my place and help me dig some more on the trench, and get the barrier material down in there.