Life in the Country: Fences and Driveways

Life in the country is full of manual labor. To wit:

Mending Fences
Along the entire north side of our property, between the house and Mt Adams, stands a rail fence. The fence was built sometime in the 80s by the Clausens, and being the perfectionists that they are, each post and rail is perfectly straight and aligned, even after 20+ years.

Of course, the very month we purchased the property, an elk tried to jump the fence and didn't quite make it. Since the posts are buried 3+ feet into the ground, with a layer of concrete at the bottom AND the top of the hole, the only thing the post was able to do to release the pressure was... break.

This was in January. It is now September, and we've finally fixed the fence! Even after some help from the Clausens removing the broken post, replacing the post took way more effort than we had anticipated, primarily because the extra post that we found (in the "boneyard" hidden in the woods) only had holes on one side, and we never did find a source for pre-drilled posts. It took us several different attempts to figure out how to drill a series of 2" holes in solid, pre-treated cedar post. Who thought fixing a fence would be so hard?

Now that we've figured it out, it shouldn't take us 8 months to replace the next broken post. But hopefully we won't have one of those for another 20+ years. I'll have to see if I can dig up some "before" and "after" photos, though we may not have any good before photos...

Free Gravel!

Out in the boonies, most driveways are either dirt or, if they are a bit fancier, crushed gravel. The typical driveway is fairly long, and maintaining a paved driveway would be fairly costly. And hey, dirt is free and sometimes gravel is, too!



One of our co-workers, David, recently finished some landscaping in his house in town that required gravel. When the job was done, he still had a big pile of gravel that he needed to get rid of. We jumped at the offer of free gravel and proceeded to load, haul, and unload two pickup loads of gravel to cover some bare spots in our driveway.



- Mike (& Corinne)