Adventures with building a fence!

Friends! I may have fallen off the blogging bandwagon. This could be due to the fact that the majority of my time these days is spent working, doing chores, and (worst of all) exercising so there’s not many fun activities to report on. I’m hoping that will change in the not too distant future. Anyway I’m here today and ready to share an accomplishment on the home front!

Mike and I have been busy putting up a fence along the back side of our backyard*. When we moved in the view we saw out of our kitchen window was a rusty chain link fence, with logs stacked in front (we don’t have a fireplace so this is puzzling), and the whole mess was covered in ivy. Not a good look as you can see from the ample photo evidence I've provided below.

More after the jump!

 

 

Last summer we managed to remove the bulk of the wood and ivy but that’s about where we stalled out. The fence belongs to a neighbor who owns basically a grass alleyway down the whole middle of the block so we wanted to talk to him before doing anything with his fence. In order to begin this operation I made these cookies** for Mike to take to our neighbors so we could talk them into either letting us remove their fence or just a segment of it so that we can access the “alleyway”.

What we got out of that conversation was that 1) they loved the cookies, and 2) we were not to take down any piece of their fence. Haha

So we decided to put up a fence inside of their fence and then restart fence negotiations from there. We wanted 1) to save money by doing it ourselves, 2) to make sure the fence would be high enough to keep Zoe from hopping out as she had done before and 3) for the fence to be pleasing to look at. Or at least better than the hot mess it was before.I think we achieved all of these goals with the panels we installed. The angle of the top photo is funny so it doesn't do our new fence justice. I love the look of the stained wood and I think once we’ve got some plants and mulch down it’s going to look positively spiffy! 

 

As you can see we do have a gate in our fence so we’re now in the process of working out the whole gate situation for the neighbors chain link fence. Hopefully that will be resolved soon as we’re going to be hiring some contractors to do some other projects for us in the next couple of months and we’d love them to have easy access to our mountaintop fortress.

* I'm using the term Mike and I loosely here as my role consisted mostly of baking muffins for his friends and occasionally helping to clean up.

** Seriously these cookies are amazing. The NYTimes and Molly of Orangette really know what's up!