First Post

Anyone who watches the show "Barnwood Builders" knows that as the crew disassembles or rebuilds an old log cabin, one member of the crew always shouts, "Last log!" as the last one comes down or the last one goes up to complete the job.  Today, Rick and I now can shout, "First post!"  We have had a busy weekend.

Rick took a "butt shot" of me digging a hole,
so I had to reciprocate for him.

The post hole digger is a great tool, but as the hole
gets deeper, I am not strong enough to use it.

We started yesterday again in winter parkas and hoods, but as the day warmed, we both shed layers of clothing.  We actually got to just sweatshirt weather by the end of the day.  Once again, this was a day to dig holes with the idea that if we got enough done early, we could put in the first post.  As usual, our plans were greater than our share of time or our store of energy.

Rick finally reaches the bottom of the corner pole hole.

The corner post hole that seemed so promising on Friday turned out to be a bear in the end.  As Rick dug deeper in the hole, he encountered some deeply buried roots.  They fought him all the way for about two feet until he finally broke through to clear soil, although that turned out to be stubborn clay.  We have learned that in that corner of the yard, once the clay or soil starts to get moist, we have reached our 48 inch level.  Every hole in that area has filled with about a foot of water once we finish digging it.

The corner pole is "dry fit" into the hole to see if
the hole was deep enough.  Then we took it out
for proper installation on Sunday.  Note the new
orange cement mixer.  It was a life-saver.

One of the other posts was also a problem with stubborn roots that seemed to criss-cross like an underground spider's web.  That, too, took more time that we had hoped it would, but in the end Rick got it down the required 48 inches.  The final of the three posts only took about 40 minutes to dig. It was virtually root-free and the clay portion of the soil was mixed with generous amounts of sand, so the digging was fairly easy.  (Rick deserved an easy hole after the other two!)

The patio houses all of the "through posts" and the "end posts"
that we will cut as we raise the fence or drop it down
to follow the contours of our wavy back yard.

We spent the rest of the day sorting the posts and moving them onto the back screened-in patio.  We are promised rain for Monday - Wednesday, so they are probably safer and easier to keep dry on the patio.

We had planned on cementing in the corner post yesterday, but we ran out of time and energy to do so.  That probably was good because getting up today and starting with a task that we have not done for a long time was better to do while we were fresh.

Cement work is the easiest part of this whole fencing process.  The new cement mixer we purchased is almost identical to the one we use in Florida, so there was no learning curve with the machine. We soon were back into our old routine working with the cement.  To make things easier, we put an old door on two sawhorses to act as a work table. We put the required bags of cement up on the table where Rick was able to simply slide one to the end, cut it open, and let the cement fall into the waiting mouth of the mixer.

Our wonky-donkey post that is plumb but not exactly true to the
square of the yard.  Ah, well, we can't all be perfect.

In a little over an hour, we had the corner post firmly cemented into the ground.  Unfortunately, we both were so concerned about getting it plumb that we both neglected to make sure it was perfectly in line with the other holes!  So our new fence post is pointing about 10 degrees off from where it should be.  We have a wonky-donkey corner post, so that is our whimsy point of the yard.  We will be able to recover our line by nudging the next panels into more in-line posts, but the corner post will always be a little off.  That's OK.  In this family, being a little off center is just who we all are.

Once the corner post was up, Rick decided to dig a couple more holes.  The instructions for this fence say that one can put up two sections of fencing and two posts all in one day.  With the two holes that Rick dug today, we now have two holes completed for both the north and the east sides of the yard.  If we need to cement in two in one day, we can do so.  As I said, cementing in the posts is the easy part.

The dirt from the holes is spread around to fill in
the low spots in the yard.  

We keep dumping the dirt from each hole into a really low spot in the yard.  We hope that if we can fill in that section, not only will we have a more level yard to enjoy, but we also might not have to step down the fence so much in the middle of the east side.  We'll have to see how much that dirt settles if we really receive heavy rains in the next few days.

At this point, all we can do is to keep on digging and keep on planting posts and fencing panels.  While we both will miss seeing the grove of birch trees through our back yard, we will not miss seeing the un-raked and uncut yard beneath those trees.  In the end, our enclosed yard will give us a private "outdoor room" to our Green Bay home.