Fencing 101
One of the few remaining issues that we needed to sort before we can get final tick-off from the council on the house was that our effluent pit needed to be fenced off. To protect it from all the stock that we, erm, don’t have and will never have around that area. Hey-ho. Just do it anyway, don’t think about it.
Luckily we have a few waratahs and fence netting lying around the place form when someone was grazing the patch a long time ago. We figure it’s now past the time when he’s likely to bother to pick it up (and even less likely now that apparently he has no stock now), so it’s been kindly taken as a donation.
So we smacked up a little fence ourselves.
Sounds easy, but it took a little longer than we thought, and we learnt a few things along the way, like:
- The ground around here is stony. Bloody stony. Of course we knew that already, but everything we do reminds us of that. Luckily we had a big mallet that Mum had procured with a load of tools which had previously been kindly donated to the cause. And we had a set of 2 steps that got us just up high enough to bang in the waratahs. We only had to bang in halfway, remove and bang in again, repeat, for 4 times with one post. Must have been a big rock in that area!
- No 8 wire fence likes to stay where it’s been previously. Trying to get it straight again after it’s been in a loose, messy roll for a year or so is actually quite hard, especially when it’s had weeds etc growing right through the roll.
- No 8 wire is actually bloody hard to cut, and pliers won’t do it. Luckily we managed to borrow some decent cutters from friends down the road.
- And an old favourite: Make sure you don’t stand right in front of someone banging in posts in case the head of your mallet falls off. (Luckily I wasn’t!)
It’s only a semi-temporary fence anyway, as until we get all the ground evened, and the piles of crap left by the drain-layers right beside it dealt with it’s a bit dangerous to put a good one in. Let’s just hope it passes the inspection!