Fencing

What do you think normal people would choose to do in the days leading up to a three-month overseas holiday?

Pack?

Sort out bills?

Say goodbye to friends and family?

Build a fence?

No, that last one is just us. Because we're crazy. Surprise!

Our next door neighbour paid us her share for a new fence between our properties months ago. We demolished the old fence, ordered the materials, even dug a few holes with our sub-standard digger equipment before returning it. But with so much going on, we still hadn't actually started building the fence.

With our holiday looming, we decided we absolutely must get the fence done before we leave. So, first step was cutting away some of next door's concrete driveway that impinged on our land. We had yet more equipment fun getting that finished, and went through about three concrete cutting machines before we got it done. Do you think it's just us that machines hate?

And then it was time to dig in new post holes with yet another hired digger machine. No boys were available to help Tom with that, so I had to step in, man up, and hop on the other end of the two-person machine (which is why we have no photos of that process, because I was too busy sweating and trying to keep my arms from being ripped out of their sockets). That took most of our last Saturday, and finally, with two hours of noise-making time left before the 6:30pm curfew hit, we started the concrete mixer up to start installing the fence posts.

And then the concrete mixer broke.

Determined not to waste the time, we hopped on the phone and begged our old over-the-back-fence neighbour to borrow his, sent Daniel off to get it, and started cutting the sleepers to size and positioning them along the boundary to retain the neighbours' driveway properly.

Allie kept an eye out, as always.

We managed to get almost half of the posts in before we had to cut the noise, and finished the rest of them over the next few days.

Then we waited for the concrete to set, and what do you know, it was the morning of the day we were to leave on our holiday, and we still had only a shell of a fence. It was time to get those panels in. And quickly!

Fortunately that part of the process was the quickest, and instantly gratifying. An hour or two's work, and magic! We finally had a fence!

That done, we could move onto actually preparing to leave the country in a few hours! Talk about cutting it fine!