My fence project

I’m about to embark on my first major home improvement project. I’ve gotten several estimates and decided to go with the contractor from the local Home Depot store.

The one thing about our house that we never reallly liked was that it does not have a fenced-in backyard. It hasn’t really been that big of a deal, but we got a Yellow Lab puppy earlier this year named Winston and he’s going to be way too big to try to keep in the house without someplace to run off his energy. The picture below was taken a few months ago. He now weighs 36 lbs and the vets says he will grow a pound a day until he’s about 8 months old.

The biggest obstacle to putting a fence around the backyard is because the driveway goes up the side of the house, curls around the length of the back of the house and goes straight into the garage (see photo above taken from the front of the house). That means that any fence we put up is going to require a gate across the driveway with some sort of automatic opener.

Tags: fence, project, puppy, house, home improvement

On each side of my house (serving as the property lines) are retaining walls which help keep the ground level since the entire block is actually on a fairly steep hill. You can see that there’s only a few feet between the driveway and the retaining wall all the way back to the back property line. Below are the same walls viewed from the opposite angle. The automatic gate will go across the driveway about 10 ft. from the southwest corner of the house and swing inward so that it’s against the side of the house when open.

Now onto the particular challenges of this job. Below you can see pictured the southeast corner of the property where the neighbor’s fence, on the retaining wall, has fallen down and is infested with termites. I’m having a new fence built which ties into the existing back fence line, but next to and on my property (retaining wall) of the one that’s fallen down. This will be interesting to keep up and protected from termites.

I’ll be faxing the agreement on Monday and waiting for them to get the permit from the city and schedule the work. In the meantime, I have a lot of work to prepare for the contractors. The vegetation (trees) have to be cleared from 2 ft. on either side of where the fence is going to go. As you can see, the back corner and the side of the house presents the biggest challenge. It’s either that or they’ll charge me $10/ft. to clear it. Oh, did I mention the $20/hole charge if they hit rock and bring out the jackhammers? Here’s hoping they don’t have to.

That’s it for now. Next weekend, expect me to be killing myself trying to remove trees and cleaning things up. Check out my flickr Fence Building photoset for the latest as it happens.