New fence

It's sort of a new fence.  We had our gardener take down our old fence a couple of weeks ago.  The old fence was leaning and just waiting for a gust of wind to blow it down.  Ha ha!

Our neighbor said that it was okay for us to make the new fence (with the old fence) perpendicular to the old one, so that's what we decided to do:

We weren't too sure about the shorter two planks that were closest to the gate.  And definitely not happy about the pile of leftover fence!

The following week, the gardener fixed up those shorter planks with no extra charge. Woohoo!!!  We did ask him if he wanted Graham's old bike, so I think he was happy with that trade (despite the punctured back tire).  Ahhh... fence is looking much better with those longer planks of wood:

I did have the gardener get a new wooden pillar.  The old one was pretty eaten up with pests:

Charlie did help me hold this one while I drilled some screws from the other side.  Those planks needed just a big more support:

Last week I decided to also sandpaper and stain.  I'm happy that the extension cord was sufficient!

When I got done with sanding, somehow I managed to get all these scrapes on my arm??!  

Hmm.... can't really see the scrapes too well in the photo, but I swear they are there!  And of course, I couldn't find the antiseptic cream.  Oh well, maybe it's just from rocks that were flying while I was sanding close to the bottom of the planks.

On to staining!  What a big difference in color:

All done on one side! It's Mosquito O'clock so the other side will have to wait until tomorrow:

And.... the next day, halfway done:

I had just enough stain to finish up.  This was the same can of stain I had used on the pergola in the backyard:

Here are Graham and Charlie digging through the garage while I was busy staining.  Ha ha!  Those are traditional woven hats from one of the tribes back in my home-state of Sabah.  I've had them since college because we used to celebrate Malaysia/International Day at Arizona State University:

Looks like the pile of old fencing is still there!  Bobby said to have the gardener dispose of it but that will of course cost a few more bucks.  So I decided to take care of it on my own.  Plus, there are still some good planks that can be recycled or upcycled.  Just think of how many birdhouses we can build with these :-D

But first, we have to pull all the old rusty nails off:

And there were a lot of them!

I finally had Graham help me out.  I'm glad no one poke anyone's eye out with those nails.  Always a bonus when no one gets hurt :-)

See, it wasn't so bad.  Most of it is a keep pile:

This plank is definitely a throw-away:

There were some nails with no nail heads as I did remember seeing the gardener cutting through the nails with an electric saw.  And those can't be recycled in the green bin, so... here comes my electric saw too :-)

Oh wait, my handsaw couldn't handle the thickness of this piece of wood, so I still needed to get my "manual" handsaw out.  Nothing like working those biceps!

 

Success! Look at all that space we have gained!  Although, technically the property line is still along the bottom/rock wall where the fence originally was:

We had recently picked up some more Palos Verdes rocks for free from a neighbor last week and I really wasn't sure what I was going to do with them.  But looks like this might be the right spot!  Now that the fence is gone, hopefully the erosion won't be too bad when it rains (whenever that might be!):

I really want to get rid of those pile of roof tiles too (to the right in the photo above).  I'm guessing the previous owner has it there to prevent the soil from coming down - which I think functions quite well, but it just does not look good.  The boys and I did go back to the same neighbor again earlier this week to pick up some more rocks but they only had some smaller ones and a couple of big ones. So hopefully with a bunch of other from our rock collection in the garden, we can come up with something!

And speaking of coming up with something... more animal bones??!

I did find some sort of carcass in this area once, when we first moved in.  And I remembered it scared the crap out of me when I actually figured out what it was!  So maybe I shouldn't be so surprised by this one bone. Actually there were two.  Maybe the previous owner just loved eating chicken wings and tossed the bones in this part of the yard. Who knows?!

Anyway, let's talk about rocks instead :-) There's some other rocks that were already here before.  Looking good!

Charlie swings by to tell me something interesting from his encyclopedia.  He is such a character!

Never a dull moment with these boys!!!