Duck fence!

Michael here.  In spite of duck-mania around the house, I haven’t done a whole lot with the ducks – work has been busy and there have been plenty of willing hands to take care of the little peepers anyway.  But I did take charge of the fence, and yesterday I got most of it put up, with the help of Hannah and my nephew. 

I contracted out the post installation.  Having watched the contractor put them in three weeks ago, this was well worth it: lots of digging, lots of concrete shoveling.  We had a busy few weeks though (cf. the First Communion post), so the posts stood alone for a bit:

But yesterday was the day for fence building.  First, the tops had to be cut off so that the posts were all even in height, and then 2x4s were cut and laid across the tops:

I only had the afternoon yesterday, and wasn’t sure I would get much farther than this.  But Hannah and my nephew joined me at this point: they drilled holes and installed screws to mount the top beams.  This freed me up to measure and drill for brackets for the lower beams, which they also screwed in.  I was amazed at how quickly this was going.

Time for the decorative wire, rescued from our rental house where we had extra from a previous project:

This is galvanized woven wire, stiff and heavy.  It doesn’t bend around corners: we carefully cut and measured each corner and used fencing staples to mount the wire into place.  I tacked in the ends and my two helpers had a ball hammering staples into place.  We had a couple of pounded thumbs, but nothing too serious.

By dinner time, we had one finished and were nearly done with the other.  I’m really pleased with how this turned out!

As it happens, I tried to hire out this whole business, and the fencing contractor said he didn’t like woven wire fences, thought it would turn out ugly, and wouldn’t I like a lovely chain link fence?  (Seriously.)  This is why I ended up having him just install the posts so that I, and my helpers, could do the rest of it.  I hope you’ll agree this looks much better than a chain link fence!