Fence me in

No progress on the landscaping, unless you consider wandering around a local nursery/stoneyard yesterday afternoon, contemplating flagstones, boulders, and shrubs, to be progress. I wish I had taken my camera along; they've got boulders 6 feet or more across that would take up a hefty chunk of my front yard (not that displacing more grass would be a bad thing), and I couldn't help imagining my neighbors' reactions if I had one of them hauled in and plunked down on the lawn under the Bradford pear. I do think a small boulder would make a nice accent, though.

Today it's raining intermittently, precluding doing anything on the landscape front, but of course it also means my newly transplanted shrubs will get watered without jacking up the water bill.

I was looking through my digital camera memory cards and ran across pictures I took while replacing my fence last fall. Here's one (above) of what my fence used to look like. It didn't give any privacy, no one else on the street had one like this, and it looked like crap. So I turned it into a privacy fence (shown here in progress, from the outside).

The old fence panels turned into a pile of pieces that I could handle (reciprocating saws are very useful tools). This is only a small part of the fencing, shot early in the process; I think there were about fifteen 8-ft long panels in all. I got rid of about the amount in the photo some months ago, and have at least that much left. Got to call the solid waste folks and ask for another pickup. A few pieces have been pressed into service as makeshift "duckboards" under the hammock and in the area that turns into a marsh when it rains (a gravel path is on my list of things to do), and into a pallet for my tiny pile of fireplace wood.

I had never done a project like this before, and it was very satisfying to complete. I lost track of the number of trips I made to Home Depot and Lowe's to get all the fence boards and 2x4s. I could get 24-30 fence pickets and 3-4 two-bys in my PT Cruiser at a time, much to the disbelief of some of the male store workers who occasionally came out to the parking lot to help load my car. (I think I loaded it myself more often than not, and I definitely unloaded it myself every trip.) I am very happy that it's done.