backyard overhaul: part two

Well, after seriously cleaning up the yard here and re-sodding it here we decided the next thing our yard needed was a pretty new fence so our not-so-little-anymore monsters can play outside in the sun all day. Remember when we got them here and here... wow, they were so much smaller!!

I digress... so we somehow conned my parents to come up for the weekend and the Kochs into helping us with yet another house project! We knew this was going to be a big one so Ryan and I both took Thursday and Friday off to get the job done.

Thursday was tearing out the old fence day. Ryan heard that if you have a farm jack it makes pulling out the posts much easier (then digging them out one-by-one). It really, really did! Unfortunately you cannot rent farm jacks, so if anyone needs to replace their fence sometime soon, call us, we have a farm jack you can borrow. We even got Kyle to come over and help with the demo!

Farm jack

Temporary yard for the puppies

Trying to get a picture of Murphy napping but Kali decided it was her moment to shine

This is the sleepy guy I was trying to capture

Day 1: no chain link fence left

Friday was post setting time and oh my was that an ordeal. So, did you know that to set fence posts you have to dig holes 3 feet deep?!?! Well, needless to say, we had a tool to help us with those too. We rented this one person auger which was very effective but also took two people to operate. (And by people I mean Ryan, my Dad or Jim - that thing was powerful.) After digging all of the post holes we went to setting the posts with over 40 bags of quickcrete (those things aren't going anywhere). Luckily we had Carlo come over and share his experience with us, we were post setting pros in no time!

Auging: As you can see this was no easy task... but definitely worth it!

Thank you Carlo for your knowledge and letting us borrow the screw
gun (another tool we'd highly recommend for fence construction)!

Check out all those posts...

This was the most difficult post hole to dig... poor guys! They all took turns and we just had to watch.

Day 2: check out all of those posts

Saturday it was time to set the rails and begin on the pickets. We went with rough cut flat top cedar 6' pickets. We plan to stain and seal them at some point down the road, but that is for another post. This process definitely took the longest but was the most rewarding because we could really see the fence taking shape. This ran over into Sunday, but by early afternoon we were done. We now have a beautiful new fence, the pups are loving their new backyard!

That's a fence!

Murphy approves!

Thank you to our wonderful parents! As usual, we could not have done it without y'all.