Remember the hazardous drop-off and open yard before, allowing my son to just tumble to a broken bone or run freely toward the street?
{Below my foot is a 3 foot drop-off to the neighbor's yard behind us
and to the neighbor's fence beside us}
Once Hubby removed 7 dead evergreens and 12 unruly rose-bushes (just not my taste and not toddler friendly with my son who would run into them eyeball first), we got to work! We rented an auger for a day from Home Depot to dig the holes...er, start digging the post holes. TN clay-soil is rock-hard below the fill-dirt the previous owner trucked in to level the yard (when he built the ridiculous, termite-infested railroad-tie retaining wall), so after starting each hole and going as far as the auger would dig, Hubby had to manually dig the rest of each hole with a post-hole digger until an 8' post would be submerged 2' down.
We set 19 posts (there is one more to set once we get the back corner of the retaining wall out, but we need our Helpful Handy neighbor's strong back to help with that, and he has been on vacation) and started framing and putting up pickets on the other sides.
The side pictured above is now complete, but I haven't taken any more photos since then. When the rain clears up (after tomorrow, according to the latest forecast I saw), we'll work on the back. The back side of the property will only have a 3.5' fence on our top of the yard above the retaining wall, appeasing the HOA by the "total fence height" not exceeding 6.5' from the top of the fence to the bottom of the retaining wall from our back-yard-neighbor's perspective. So it will take longer since we'll have to cut each 6' picket to the correct height.
But we're making lots of progress!
Our goal is to have the fence completed and get the pergola built over the patio by the end of May. Here's hoping weather cooperates and our Helpful Handy neighbor is around to provide some more brut-strength help for Hubby (and some borrowed tools from his own previous projects)!
No comments:
Post a Comment