Is building a fence in our wheelhouse of skills? We're not so sure.
This past week we had someone from the CDOT access permit sector come out to take a look at our front entrance to see if it checked all the boxes and, well, it did not. Overall, he did say that it looked good, but the one thing that needed adjusting was the property/entrance line. Currently, there are large rocks that indicate where the property line is and where the entrances are, but that doesn’t quite cut it in the eyes of CDOT.
As of now, we have two entrances onto the property, but the drawings for the project indicate that there will only be one entrance. That means that we need to make that single entrance clear and direct people to that one and only entrance. Not a huge deal, should be a fairly easy task right? Well, we were about to find out.
The first step in the process of building a fence is deciding what type of fence you actually want to have. To help make our decision, we did a little drive around some properties near us to take a look at the different fences everyone had to get some ideas, and of course did a little Google search as well. In the end, we decided that we liked the look of wood posts and metal poles, especially considering we already had some metal posts that could be used so we could save a little on costs.
Somewhere else we could save on costs? The installation process. Have we ever put up a fence ourselves before? No. Was that going to stop us from trying? Heck no! So, after a little research, we learned that to get the posts into the ground properly we needed an augur. Lucky, Scott loves visiting Harbor Freight weekly and, it just so happens that they had one there. The video we had watched about how to use an augur showed a large one that needed two people to operate it properly, which we ultimately decided would not be the best option for us – ya know, since we would like to stay married. The one from Harbor Freight was smaller and could be operated by one person – a strong person that is.
We knew the ground out here is pretty hard and that it wouldn’t be easy, even with the new augur to dig the holes for the posts, but we were willing to give it a shot!
Although he said that the weight overall didn’t feel too heavy, it definitely gave him a run for his money once it was on. Just imagine trying to push a heavy, spinning, rod into hard dirt and trying to keep it straight and steady while it is trying with all it’s might to push the opposite direction- it was not an easy task and he was definitely sore the next day.
I even gave it a shot to see if I could handle it, and let’s just I am so happy that it didn’t throw me to the ground when it turned on because the resistance you need on it when it’s spinning is way more than I was expecting! I’ll think I’ll leave it to Scott on this one.
Once we got the holes dug we learned that a couple had some concrete at the bottom and were a bit more shallow, therefore, they wouldn’t be able to hold the posts in as well as the deeper holes. To help create a stronger hold in these holes we are going to add a bit of concrete to lock them into place.
There are certainly more steps to putting up a fence than we thought there would be, but hopefully, we will manage to get it put together this next week.
We aren’t 100% sure if we will be able to get it completely done on our own, but we are going to at least get done as much as we can before calling in some reinforcements!
