The old fence had had it's day in the sun, in fact it had so many days in the sun that the only thing holding it together was a layer of crusty old paint, some well intentioned lichen and a particularly stable gravitational pull.
« As you can see from the pictures, it was a fairly ramshackle gate & fence combo, and - since I had a few friends who were starting to have kids, there was a potential to need an area where the kids to amble around without being able to escape the backyard and make their way onto the very busy Onewa Road.
The trellis was quite easy to see through from the street and the new fence would give us a bit more privacy along with providing me with some hefty posts to which I could them attach my intended pergola (which will in turn support a swing seat over the garden).
The fun bit was, as you'd expect, demolishing the old fence and pulling out the semi rotten posts. The added bonus was when we realised that part of the volcanic rock wall would also need to be 'relocated' to give us enough room to place the last post.
Now, something that needs to be explained before you can appreciate the image of a 90cm deep hole, is that my Dad was born and bred in the Waikato and, for the sake of this tale at least, this qualifies him as a bit of a hard arse. His tales of "how they did it in my day" (while not being too inspiring), did preclude us from hiring a post hole borer, so the 90cm hole you see in the image below was dug entirely by hand using nothing more than a spade until that was too short, and then a wee garden trowel and pulling the loose earth out (for the record, my arms are only 90cm long if my face is touching the mud).
The rest of the project was fairly straightforward. I doubt I'll be spending my time digging posts by hand in the future as I can hire a powered post hole borer for far less than the cost of the additional time it takes to do it the manual way - next time I'll have a nice grunty petrol powered tool with which I can race through all the holes I need quickly and efficiently.
09/12/2000 - Day 1 - The fence comes down, the posts come out, Rob spends several hours with an arm down a hole and his face in the dirt.
10/12/2000 - Day 2 - The rest of the posts go in and the concrete is left to cure before we can start whacking nails into the posts.
16/12/2000 - Day 3 - The next weekend sees the posts all in and the concrete cured, simple job to wack up the trellis and don't it look grand!
Images: [90cm of Hell] | [End of Day 1] | [End of Day 2] | [End of Day 3]