DIY Fence

Yes this is our house when we bought it, you can even see the for sale sign in front, We fell in love with this house and were super excited to move into our first house (after living in apartments and at "home" for 6 years) do you see how you can't really see the house? yeah the trees needed trimmed. Also do you see the hedges, I wish I had a better picture of the hedges, they were in bad shape... and they really didn't help our landscape, or how much yard we truly could have so...




We took the hedges out and put up a fence on our property line... which is skewed quite a bit, instead of our lot line being a perfect square it's skewed to the East and west, I know all of this because I had to make a trip to our county auditor office and research the land and get the plot map for the Sunset Addition, since the city had never got this land surveyed. (we are thinking what sort of city wouldn't have gotten this land surveyed right?) So we had our uncle Dave who use to be a surveyor for Polk co. come out and surveyed the land.

Although you can't tell that our fence is skewed from the picture, you can sorta tell when looking from it in our back yard



"Our getting there back yard", I say that because you can see where there is a patch of dirt, that is were our tree stump was, we got two tree stumps removed in our back yard when we had our hedges removed. We are going to need a ton of grass seed, as the hedges were taking up a lot of space in our yard.


This might seem like an ordinary gate, in fact it is, but the workman ship of it, is amazing to me! Gar's dad is an amazing skilled carpenter! The two gates he made for us, to me is something I could never create or try. He bought the hardware and then was able to do it all from his head! wow. Of course the fence was made possible by lots of people including mom/Grandma (Mel) Joe (Gary's brother) Brian, the Fulmers (they helped us finish the pickets, so the project could be done among being there three out of the four days were were working on it! Steven E, Uncle Jim and Matt H. was able to rent a skid loader with a post hole digger attachment to get all the holes dug in one night, he was our hero Friday night when things were not looking so hot...



this is the side that Gary and I mostly did, we had help, lots of help but this was our little bit of contribution, and I am just meaning that we put the pickets on, not the whole fence part, when it comes to handy man and building skills we both lack a lot of those skills. Thank heaven for family and friends that know thier stuff! see all that dirt? that is were the hedges use to be and now we have like 5 more feet on both sides of back yard we can use! we now have a huge back yard!

This last weekend we had about 6 inches of rain, so that mud that we had to work around was not easy to work around, it has been dry for 3 days now and you can still see how wet the dirt is! it was nuts, they guys didn't have to add much water to the concrete since there was so much water in the holes when we were going to set the posts! This fencing project was all done in 4 days! all 130 odd feet of fencing! with 24 posts to set, and 330 odd pickets! All I can say is thank you for everyone who helped with our big project for the year! we are so blessed to have such wonderful family and friends that like to help us!