The Fence – and its part in my downfall…

I live in an old house and it requires a lot of upkeep. I do a lot of that upkeep myself, but sometimes, when it’s important, or it would be particularly obvious if I stuffed it up, I prefer to pay a professional to do it. This is a tale of me trying to have someone do a job properly and then me ending up doing it anyway.

It might also be said that I have a thing for fencing, not in the ‘oooooohhhhh, I love fencing’ way, but more in the way of – ‘I need a decent fence’. I cannot abide the open plan style of housing where someone can wander all around your house without being picked up on the thermal cameras. triggering the motion sensitive lights, stepping on any of the pressure pads, stumbling over trip wires or initiating one of several cunningly concealed booby traps.

Just remember, it’s not paranoia if they really are out to get you…

Luckily, being an old farm, they didn’t want any animals wandering off, so it had stone walls for perimeter fencing most of the way around, but around the house, they obviously wanted something more decorative. There was a rickety waist high picket fence when we first bought the house and over the years I had repaired and replaced the pickets as they rotted, or falling branches knocked bits off.

Eventually, I became fed up with the smallest dog leaping out through holes in the fence as the roots from the huge tree we had growing on the property line pushed the fence apart. We had the tree felled, which was an ordeal its itself, but all the time, I was trying to put off the day when the stump had to be removed and the fence had to be replaced. Of course, that day came and after weeks of grinding, chopping, burning and swearing, I gave up and paid the guy who felled the tree to come and bring his massive stump destroying machine and get rid of it once and for all.

In order for him to get to the stump, I had to dig out what was left of the fence, which entailed me hacking out a virtual Maginot line of concrete, rocks, wire and metal. The graves of at least two previous fences were under there and as there was originally a blacksmiths forge on the property, I suspect that the Smith had tipped all of his metal cut offs in the holes, to ‘reinforce’ them. Digging out hole after hole was a Sisyphean task and it put me on my back for a day or two, but I eventually struggled to my feet and and visited the mystical ‘Kiro Kids’ ™️ whose spooky pressure point techniques managed to straighten out my pretzel like spine and have me walking again without looking like a WWII Polish great grandmother.

Somewhere we had found a water colour post card of the house, based on an old photograph and it showed that there was a twisted wire fence with plain wooden posts and so with that in mind, I planned to replicate but personalise the original fence.

I pictured it in my head, sketched it out and after shopping around, I eventually found the timber I needed for a reasonable price. Over the next few weeks, I primed and painted the wood, to try and make sure that it would last as long as I needed. Although it isn’t a heritage colour, I painted the wood black to fit in with the colour scheme we are planning on for the house but that’s the next big project that I won’t start until the summer. I even found a supplier of heritage twisted wire and someone for a replica of the old and heavy ‘sunshine’ farm gates. I hitched up the trailer and collected everything else over a weekend.

I was pretty sure that such a fence would be beyond my meagre DIY talents and most certainly within the Christmas 2020/2021 time frame for completion that had been suggested (i.e. stipulated) and so I shopped around for tradies on the internet. Unsurprisingly, no one could do the job before the holidays for any kind of affordable price and so in frustration, I called one of the local wood yards and asked them if they had any recommendations. They claimed that they only recommended one guy, who specialised in ‘old style’ feature fencing. And so, like a lamb to the slaughter, I called him.

This fellow and I’ll call him ‘FW’ after a very appropriate Australian insult, agreed to do the work for an almost reasonable sum and claimed that he could have it finished before Christmas. Gulled into a false sense of security, I agreed to meet him on site to brief him before I headed up into the mountains for yet another presumably unsuccessful deer hunting trip. At my most politely pedantic, I explained that I wanted the posts a third of their height in the ground (I googled it and apparently that’s the way to do it), I marked the exact distance in between posts and I even showed him pictures of how I wanted the wire fixing to the posts and which way I wanted the gates hanging. I left for the mountains feeling that I could not have done any more or been any more clear in communicating my requirements.

I’d been on the road about three hours when I received a call telling me that all of the wood I had purchased was either the wrong length, the wrong width or unsuitable for the design. I was pretty cross, but I blamed myself, after all FW was the professional. I should have suspected something when FW offered to provide the timber and have it installed before I got back but by that stage, I just wanted the fence up and so even though he told me it would cost more, I told him to go ahead.

I returned from the mountains tired but happy, even if the Deer evaded me again; but the smile disappeared from my face when I saw a wooden version of Donald Trump’s border fence. I couldn’t believe it, the posts were almost four metres high! The big gate posts that I’d insisted on and he’d kept, were so high I couldn’t think that they were actually in the ground. I couldn’t resist it and so I wobbled one of them. It fell straight over. The 2.8 metre high gate posts were 400mm in the ground and that wasn’t a third, by anyones maths.

There was no way that posts that shallow in the ground were going to hold a gate that weighed 70+kgs, plus they just looked ridiculous. The front gate posts were so tall, I thought that they might have been the beginning of some kind of ceremonial arch.

I called FW and asked him what he was playing at and he actually got quite shirty and insisted that the work would be ‘fine’ I explained that it wouldn’t be fine in any way, shape or form and that he should come and get his wood, clean up the worksite, (which was a mess) and not to expect to be paid. With the speed of a 1000 startled Gazelles, his offsider appeared and pulled the posts that he’d supplied, straight out of the ground and threw them on the back of his truck, before driving off. Bastard.

By then, the holidays were almost upon us and so I put in a temporary chicken wire fence to amuse the foxes, momentarily delay the dogs, give the smallest boy something to destroy and decided that I’d wait until after the holidays to find someone to fix the fence. Unfortunately, the shallow holes that the long poles had been in were now full of concrete and so I asked around for an introduction to someone with a digger and an auger bit. I quite quickly found a lovely old guy who’d clearly long been retired, but was desperate to get out of the house and use his very well maintained toys again. He actually turned up within forty minutes of me calling him and with a smile on his face, he quickly routed out the holes to the correct depth with his backhoe and didn’t charge a fortune. I covered up the holes and went on to eat and drink myself into a Christmas coma on a daily basis.

Over the break I endured much piss taking about my sagging chook wire fence and numerous age related comments and I decided that no matter how long it took, I would do it myself, to the best of my ability. After all, I reasoned. I couldn’t possibly do a worse job than FW.

After Christmas, I started uncovering the holes and scooping out the mice and frogs that had fallen in and I ordered the bags of quick set concrete. Turning my back for a moment I heard a small cry and turned around to see blond tuft of hair bobbing above the grass. Smallest boy (now 6) had fallen into the hole and couldn’t get out. I mulled over leaving him in there for a while as a kind of childcare facility, but after a moment, I lifted him out and set him to work with the hose pipe. I lined up and propped the posts in the holes, poured in the bags of dry concrete and he topped them up with water.

Over the next couple of months, I rebated the rails into the posts; stuffing things up on several occasions, but I got them looking square and a bit like something a professional had built – if you didn’t look too closely of course. The great thing about working with wood is that when you stuff up and I often do, you can trim, fill, sand, paint and hide your mistakes. My father would never let anyone see his attempts at DIY until something had been completely fluffed and buffed. I now understood exactly where he was coming from.

Working on weekends and in-between different clients emergencies; I managed to deal with the weather and passing villagers questions about how long it was going to take, what it was going to look like when it was finished and why did it originally look like I was building a prison of war camp? Slowly… oh so slowly, I fixed the wire onto the posts, touched up the scrapes and hung the small gate. I felt that it didn’t look half bad, but the next challenge was the heavy farm gate.

I was quietly confident that the posts would be more than strong enough as I had buried them over 800mm into the ground and they had 6 bags of cement around each of them. They had also had about three weeks to set so I just had to make sure that I drilled the holes for the bolt hinges properly and so I jury rigged my drill with a couple of levels and gave it my best shot.

Heath Robinson had nothing on me

After eschewing any kind of assistance and attempting to move the 3mts wide gate from its resting place to the posts, I realised that I was well on the way to becoming Polish Babusia again and I rolled around on the ground at an attempt at some spine stretching yoga. A passing MAMIL pulled his feather weight, but massively over priced bicycle over and concernedly asked if I was ok? I grunted in the affirmative and managed to choke out the word “DIY” He smiled, nodded sagely and clipping his silly clacky shoes back into the pedals breezed away to his latte down at the local cafe.

I decided that being able to walk was marginally more important than saving face by not asking for help and so I enlisted the help of Mrs Jerry and #2 Son and between us, we carefully inserted the bolts through the post and hung the gate in pride of place. After a fraught moment with my finger being crushed between the post and the gate, we did a little bit of adjustment with the bolts and stood back to admire the finished result. It had taken just over 8 months, but not including my time, it had cost around the same as if FW had done it.

The fence, now looking a bit like a ‘bought one’

It was difficult not to walk the perimeter several times a day casting a critical eye over the fences imperfections, but I sanded and touched up the bits that upset me me the most until one evening we stood with the the neighbours and had a socially distanced drink. Filled with Nurofen and ale, I straightened my spine and smiled with just a hint of pride. That was just before a large Magpie briefly landed, then shat copiously, christening the side of the largest gate post.

Cheaper than Champagne I thought.