Our new fence

Righto - a second blog entry for the day. Those on facebook will already know about our new fence - but this is for those that aren't on facebook. I went and visited Debz out in Caboolture on Wednesday and was able to get some photos off my camera while I was out there. Actually it was really nice going out there as 3 of the kids were at school and Isabelle was a quiet as a mouse, so we could just chat about random stuff :-) I really enjoyed it. Maybe I will get to do it a bit more now that I am an unemployed bum ;-) ha ha

Anyway, the fence! So we have 2 housing commission houses down our left boundary (like State Houses) that had new fences put up recently. Being housing commission it meant that the government paid for the whole new fence - so we got it for free. Yay!! A major bonus for us is that we got the "pretty" side of the fence too. One of the the neighbours has a shed right up no the boundary, so there wasn't enough room to put the boards on their side of the boundary - so we got the boards on our side, for the whole length of the fence. Sweet!! Plus the fence contractors removed all our old trees and shrubs along the boundary as well - for free!! That must have saved us SO much money! We got a stump ground up last year and it cost over a hundred dollars just for that. The contractors removed 2 trees, an old very large tree stump and quite a few hedges - so that is a lot of effort and a lot of grinding up as well :-)

It did take them a LONG time to do the fence (3 weeks) but the benefit of that was I got to see each step of putting the fence up. So now I reckon we could have a good shot at putting up one ourselves :-)

So here are a whole bunch of photos of the new fence.

The old fence:
This photo is at the back of the property and shows some of the trees that got removed.
The only ones we kept along the boundary were our citrus trees

The view along the boundary line from the back of the section looking to the front

Some of the shrubs that we had removed

This is a good comparison photo for when the fence is actually up. I hated the tall tree on the right and am very glad it has gone. It has some weird fruit on it with a sticky pink flesh that tasted awful. Only the birds, bats and possums liked them - and they dropped the sticky flesh and half eaten fruit all over our lawn!! Yuk!

This is at the front of the section and shows the annoying hedges that were removed

Those annoying hedges again. There was a huge tree stump in amongst them too that got removed! Yay!

The new fence process:

So they took down the old fence and left us with this delightful orange one for a whole weekend. It was meant to keep in the little yappy dog that lives next door. You never see if though so I think it is an indoor dog

The hedges and trees still needed to be removed at this point

One week in and finally the old trees and hedges are gone

The old poles being removed - a very hard job apparently. You can see how much section space we have regained from getting rid of those hedges though. Quite a lot!

It was very weird for a few days have absolutely no fence here!

And finally the new poles start going in. The fence is 1.8 metres high - so it required rather large poles. They used metal poles as the termites don't find those very tasty ;-) ha ha

The fence drops to 1.2 metres at the front of the section. It looks a bit strange to be honest.

We're into week 3 now and they finally started putting up the boards

But no boards at the back of the section - just the cross beams (or whatever the technical term is)

The remainder of the big wood pile that sat on our section for a few weeks - poor dead grass

The new fence:

And the final product
Looking towards the back of the section

Looking towards the front of the section.
I want to paint the fence, probably to match in with the house when we get that done this year. Then I want to put some in some nice plants along the fence line.

This is my favourite view of the fence
We need to plant a new citrus tree in the gap now. I'm thinking a lime or mum suggested a mandarin tree. We already have 1 orange (far left), 2 grapefruits (second on left and another out of the photo), a lemon (the one on the right in this photo) and some other one (not sure what it is - 3rd on left)

So there you have it. The saga of our new fence. And it was all for free! Delightful really.

The only downside as we see it is that we no longer get to chat to our neighbours. Plus it doesn't actually give you any privacy in the house since all of our houses are high set. But I like it anyway and once painted, it will make our section look much better. Once I get a job we're going to save up and get a nice front fence put in as well :-) Then maybe we can get a dog - yay!!