Poodle defense established

You may remember the poodle story from last month. Well, today the damn poodle came BACK! I was sitting in the den drinking coffee (why does this little bastard only show up when I'm undercaffeinated?) with the patio doors open and clicketyclicketyclickety here it comes hauling ass across my yard. Thank god Banders was inside. I managed to keep Cersei in, slam the door in the poodle's face, and yell "GO HOME POODLE" at the top of my lungs til it got bored and left. Hopefully its stupid human heard me yelling, but she obviously has no real control over the dog.

Like, it's a poodle. It's not ravaging my livestock or even really inconveniencing me. It just sucks that I have to stay on guard - can you imagine how badly that scene could've gone if that stupid dog ran inside my house and set the crackninja off and then got in a fight with Cersei? And it totally wanted to come inside too! fffffffff

So I went to Home Depot and bought crap to put up a crappy fence. See, the old crappy fence blew down in the neverending spring blizzards, and I can't make a commitment to where I want to put up a new nice fence - or even what kind of fence I'd put up if I could just figure out where!



Here's the sat view of our poor backyard, at some point before we bought it. You can see the green pool, the white propane tank, the black .. thing? trampoline? The white square is the concrete patio - the hot tub is just peeking out of the shadow of the house.

Here it is today.


Yellow is the horse paddock hotwire. Blue is a perfectly nice run of chain link, with a nice double gate (not shown). I took out the pool (and black mystery object) so you can see how weird the remaining piece of deck looks and how it affects the yard and fenceline. The green line is the wooden privacy fence that blew down. Red and orange are my other options for fencing the backyard permanently.

The L-shaped green fenceline doesn't make much sense without the pool there. But I've still got some usable posts there, so that's where I ran the poodle fence.

I bought 100' of 4' welded wire, some chain link fence thingies, a come-along, and some bolts to make the fence stretcher thingie. I also got some t-posts to fill in the gaps, but honestly, I'm not sure if I'm going to use them. This isn't a permanent fence, it's not sagging, and I don't know if I am even going to bother with t-posts.

I used the chain link fence thingies to hook the welded wire on to the nice chain link fence post.


The only reliably sturdy object to hook the come-along to is, of course, my truck.



Here's the fence puller thingie. It's a scrap 2x4 cut in half, then clamped together, with holes drilled through both boards. While it was still clamped I made some random little reference marks - the sharpie lines.


That's so I can easily tell if I've got the boards both facing the right direction or not. Anyway, you put one board on each side of the end of the fencing. Bolt the boards together with your carriage bolts, and the pull from your come-along is more evenly distributed.

The fence looks damn fine for a first practical application of theoretical knowledge. I mean, I have seen dudes use come-alongs, and I understand the theory of fence-stretching, but I'd never really DONE this before.

The short leg of the L has no freakin line posts at all, and if I get off my lazy ass and pound t-posts tomorrow this is where I'll pound them. It's about 25'. That is pretty tight for welded wire!


The long side came out good too.


It all looks pretty awful, what with the jacked up old posts and the trash that needs picking up and the general weirdness of the deck and arrrgh. But at least I can drink coffee in peace, I hope.

For bonus poodle defense points, I shoveled dirt all along the bottom of the fence. I mean, the stupid thing can still dig in pretty easily, but if that damn poodle digs in to my fence, I'm just going to let Banders kill it.

Sometimes I just patch things

I try to only talk about the beautiful yet affordable projects I undertake, because it's much nicer to pretend that any house issue can be fixed with a coat of paint and some clever trim. But some problems are larger, and of course things break with no regard to timing.

We've got a slimy cesspool broken above-ground swimming pool in the backyard. A couple days after we closed on the house, we plugged the filter unit in and the magic blue smoke came out and the filter was no more. We decided not to replace the filter - above-ground pools have a finite life and don't really add to the value of the house. And we're on a well. In the desert. It's kinda dumb.

Anyway, everything else was breaking or malfunctioning and I didn't get the damn thing totally drained before winter, so now it really is a slimy cesspool. Homeowners' insurance requires that our attractive nuisance swimming pool be fenced off with locked gates. We scrambled to get the backyard technically "fenced" - please enjoy this shot of a chain link fence ziptied to the existing fence to cover a random hole.


Classy, I know. Anyway. The double gates by the garage broke in the last windstorm. So did about 18' of the fence on the woodpile side of the house. The whole privacy fence is pretty precarious, and the gate latch board broke. The fence on the woodpile side had a dry-rotted post that gave up the ghost in a blizzard a couple weeks back - I watched it slowly creak sideways in the wind. Poor fence!

I measured for the woodpile fence, then went around and checked the gates. I only needed one 1-by plank to fix the gate, so I checked the barn and lucked out!

Here's the repaired re-locked gate. You can see that I didn't even bother to rehang the handle - it's got a latch on the other side and a lock on the latch and that's good enough.


Yes, the replacement board is too short. It gaps at the top and bottom. It's hard to care, when the tops of the two gates lean against each other because of this:


The board and backing post are split and there's like one carriage bolt holding the top hinge on. It's really hard to care about this - there is NO easy fix. All the boards are incredibly dried out and split from the weather, we don't use the gate, and we only need the fence to be there to keep the insurance company from freaking out and dropping us. As soon as I finish draining the pool I can trash the liner, recycle the aluminum, and get it off our insurance.

We're tossing around a bunch of ideas for what to do with the space when the pool is gone. It'll be some kind of outdoor lounging and/or cooking area - maybe a chiminea, maybe just the grill and some chairs?

Until then, well, it's locked away from suicidal neighborhood children.