In the south west corner of our land is the paddock. This is approximately an acre of land that was bordered by a standard 3 bar field fence with a five bar gate in the far south west corner. A further five bar gate out on to the road is situated at that end of the property (we refer to it as the south gate – sounds very grand, if somewhat pretentious) and previous owners have obviously brought horses and other livestock in that way to access the paddock. While we weren’t going to have horses due to allergies we were initially keen to get a couple of sheep as pets and to keep the paddock grass short. The first issue with this was the state of the fence as it was a couple of decades old and the posts were rotting through at ground level with many of the rails also suffering from decay. We were considering patching it up as best as we might, but the further we looked at this option the more we realised it may become a never-ending job and with livestock installed we wanted to be sure they would not be able to 'do a runner' due to a collapsed fence rail or the likes.
The paddock as was with the old fence, gate at the bottom corner and a shot of the 'south gate' onto the property.
As a result, we decided to bite the bullet and re-fence the entire paddock as well as taking the opportunity to move the gate to the north west corner meaning a lot less of a walk from the house to access the paddock and less chance of undesirables hopping over the south perimeter gate and into the paddock. Of course we did this in the midst of installing the solar (see the Solar project) and building the sheds (see the Sheds project), but we don't like the prospect of being bored so why not? So the fencing was done with new posts and rails, but not until we’d had some fun with a local contractor who we organised to use a machine to drive in the new posts (all 156 of them) in the name of saving us some time (with the other two projects in full swing). We had decided to relocate the posts slightly to avoid trying to re-use the existing post holes where in many cases the old posts had snapped off in the ground and to make this job easy for the contractor we carefully set out the location of the posts with them being exactly 1.8m apart and lined up via a string line to ensure the fence would run true.
The post locations were marked using standard site marker paint and all the contractor had to do was position the machine over each mark and drive the post in. Unfortunately, we weren’t on site the day he came due to work commitments, but we weren’t worried as he did this all the time so how hard could it be? Well quite difficult it seems as when we returned the posts were all over the place and not even vertical so contact was made, an argument ensued (it was good enough we were told) and eventually we moved on as life is too short. Sadly (or perhaps not), we didn’t photograph the mess as the very next day we hired a post puller and we extracted them all in a fit of pique. We also hired a post hole borer and this time we put the posts in ourselves which made for a far better job. New rails with standard wire stock fence in between were installed along with a new five bar gate.
This left us with a beautifully secure newly fenced paddock (with the solar panels now installed in the corner).
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