Ghetto Fence

Jason and I have had this need to take on difficult tasks lately. We have been attempting – unsuccessfully to date – to move Sparky the donkey. We’ll have more on the donkey (mis)adventures later. For anyone who missed that bit of fun you can find the donkey moving post here with an update here.

We decided to take a breather from failed attempts at relocating Sparky and turned our attention to fence building instead. The World’s Cutest Fainting Goats are also going to need to send out their change of address cards soon. They are waiting on us to build them a new paddock with goat worthy fencing. Board fencing won’t contain a goat so they need wire fencing. I have learned that working with wire is a lot more difficult than working with wood. For starters a roll of sheep and goat wire is heavy, think 300 pounds. I quit before things even got started because I told Jason I was not going to repeatedly help maneuver ridiculously heavy rolls of fence wire. I happily handed my torch over to Bryan and he and Jason have been building the goat paddock this week.

Things didn’t get off to a great start. They unrolled some wire and attempted to stretch it tight with a crow bar. The wire got nailed onto a few sections of wood fence. I have to say it looked awful, and yes I did voice my opinion aloud. No one threw rotten tomatoes at me but the expressions indicated that it was under serious consideration.

Jason did however step back and evaluate their initial stretch of wire fencing. After staring at it for a few minutes he announced that it did, indeed, look like poop (he actually used a different word). His solution was they were going to cut off that section of the fence there, place the gate in the next two sections, and then start over again. I said “instead of trying to redo it and make it look decent you’re just going to stop, hang the gate in the next couple of sections, and then just try again?” Jason responded in the affirmative.

Jason announcing his plans to just stop, put in a gate, then start over.

“The gate will go right here”

Thanks to Bryan they borrowed a wire stretcher for the rest of the wire. I have to say the next several sections of wire look quite nice. Things started going downhill again once they ran out of existing wood fence to work with. The post hole digger we have for the tractor is a very contrary thing and is fond of digging crooked holes. Jason wasn’t too keen on hand digging every hole. So he decided to only dig a few holes to concrete in wooden posts and the rest of the posts would be t-posts.

I mentioned that it would be a lot harder to stretch the wire tight without all of the posts being wood posts. Jason’s response to that was to go purchase a bunch of panels instead of using more rolled fence wire. That did solve the problem of the wire not being stretched tight. However now we have this one line of fence where the fencing materials don’t match. When they were done I told Jason it looked like poop. I am now referring to the fence as the Ghetto Fence because we have mismatched sections, sections that aren’t stretched tight, and in general it just looks all ghetto. It just does. We have miles and miles and miles of gorgeous fence, and then we have this. We have not yet broken the news to the World’s Cutest Fainting Goats that their accommodations are not quite up to their usual standards. They will find out at some point in the not so distant future anyway.

Jason announced that he and Bryan were going to go into the fence building business together. He said they would be J&B Fence Company. His slogan was “J&B Fence Company, you will only hire us once!” I cannot disagree with that. Who says there is never truth in advertising?

Look at that mismatched fence. It took some serious fence building skills to produce such fine work.