Starting to feel fenced in.

Another Friday night date spent at a home store…this time picking out $800 worth of fencing material {not including the actual chain link fence we purchased at Lowes earlier this week.} Eugene, Eugene’s dad, and I started early Saturday morning installing the rest of our chain link fence. We were lucky enough to have both longer sides of our yard already fenced in by our neighbors & they gave us permission to tie into their fence, so we only have to fence the back of our yard and the front sides to the house.

We also rented a two-man auger to help us drill holes for our posts, even through the roots of our trees.

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This guy was a beast to handle…basically gave me an extremely intense speed squat work out along with forearm curls. I flashed back to volleyball three-a-days, but this time around I was way out of shape! The auger was 55 bucks to rent for four hours, an unbudgeted splurge, but because of the roots, we decided it would be a good idea. Plus, we only needed it 2 hours {and 1 hour was spent trying to dislodge it from the very wet ground once we accidentally got it stuck.} The rental employee told me once I returned it, “Yeah, we probably should warn people when they rent those that they get stuck easily when the ground’s wet.” Um, yes, that would have been very helpful. Thanks for sharing that two hours too late. :/

And since I’m being honest on our budget for the house, I should confess that I was way off on my budget for the fence. I only priced the chain links {$300}, but once you added in all the poles, hardware, quickcrete, etc, we were up above $1,200. Sheesh, way off. Knowing this, I was even happier that we didn’t have to fence the entire yard.

So six or so hours, three trips to Home Depot {the concrete mix was too heavy for one trip}, two trips to Lowes, and LOTS of muscle and hard work, took us from this…

to this…

See the poles in the back by the evergreen trees? Here’s a closer view…

I know it doesn’t look like much, but we were happy to have made this progress.