No More Houdinis!

The day that we got on a plane and jetsetted over to Europe months ago, we built a fence. And yes, we do know we're crazy, and that we should have been doing something useful like packing.

The idea was to be able to keep our darling Allie pup safe and sound and inside the boundaries of our property while we were away. Unfortunately our flashy new fence only covered one of those boundaries. So we settled for a dog mesh temporary option for the rest of the block.

It didn't work. Allie became quite the Houdini in our absence, and Daniel and neighbours that we'd never even met before formed a dog-protection team to try to keep her safe. There were a couple of close calls, and we returned home with the certainty that we had to do something to make sure our darling girl would live out her fifth year in its entirety.

Since there are quite a few things we need to get done before we can build a proper front fence for real, we decided our best fast option would be to strengthen our temporary fence and make it Allie-proof.

Smart little cookie that she is, Allie had worked out that if she jumped against the dog mesh she could collapse it far enough to then climb over it. So we decided that stringing wire very tightly through the top row would prevent it from being doggie-collapsed.

It is incredibly hard to get good photos of a teeny weeny wire fence!

Then it was tent peg thingies (again, the official name for them) to secure the bottom row very firmly to the ground, so there's no digging underneath...

And secure attachment to solid things on the edges - i.e. the shed.

 

 It's definitely not pretty.

But it does the job, and it was cheap!

There's a few metres that we also needed to cover between the back of the shed and the back fence, and we'd run out of dog mesh. So we improvised. Again, probably the ugliest fence you'll ever see.

And our gate certainly won't win any beauty prizes. We found it for $30 at a demolition yard, and it sure beats having to build one ourselves!

So this is now Allie's view.

We've had no escapes yet, and Allie seems to be enjoying the freedom of patrolling her own yard perfectly well yet again (plus she knows that her mum's back now, and there will be consequences if she's naughty!), so all is well for the moment.

Can't wait to get a real fence, though! In the meantime, I'll just have to enjoy the construction-chic that we've got going on.