Building Fence

Well.....it's been a while since I posted, but I've been out and about!  I and three other students were chosen to go to Atlanta this last weekend and present to the FEA conference!  What a treat to go south for a visit.  I've been to Atlanta before and enjoyed the visit.  The other friends I was with hadn't been there before, so it was fun showing them the little bit that I knew about it.  I wish though that we had more time...there are so many things I would like to see and do and we just didn't have the time. 

But now with that aside...I want to tell you all about building the fence at the farm.  When we purchased it, there were just some scraggly remains of an old fence.  So, we knew we needed to get it done...you can't keep your cows in if you don't!  After measuring the perimeter, we figured it was roughly about 2 miles of fence.  We started purchasing posts and barbed along until we felt that we had enough.  If you purchase a pallet of posts you'll sometimes get a little discount.  We purchased about 1000 posts which gave a little leverage when it came to pricing.  If you will call around for prices, sometimes stores will match prices.  You've got to do what you can to save money in these times.  We watched for specials and did a lot of price checking. 

Last spring we hired a man to weld the corners and the entrance gates.  Your fence is only as good as your corners and we want this to last. 

We hired a local man to do the welding and purchased the pipe in bulk from a company that specializes in pipe.  The welder told us what we needed and I ordered it.  The problem we encountered though was that the pipe was longer than anything we had to haul it.  Fortunately, the welder had a long enough trailer and he hauled it to the farm for us. 
After he was finished, we were ready to start pounding posts into the ground. It was July and we were ready to get started.  We knew we could do this! 

We stretched our string from welded post to welded post, laid out our posts at 10 foot intervals and began pounding post in the ground.   After about 50 of these buggers we thought maybe we should hire a local guy who had been bugging us to hire him to put in the fence.  We're no spring chickens any more and thought maybe we ought to give him a call, besides it was HOT and we just don't have a lot of time.  So we called him, he came and he and the Mr. shook hands on a price.  Well after waiting 6 months on this guy to start, we decided he didn't want to work.....imagine that!  So, we put our gloves back on and got to pounding posts again!

866 post later, we  had put in 5 1/2 ft. steel fence posts with 5 strands of barbed wire all around the place. There is great satisfaction in driving down the road that borders our place and seeing all of that fence that WE put in!  If I do say so myself, it looks pretty darned good!