Nesting: the fence

When we moved into this house, I immediately HATED the little "entryway" outside of our front door. There were these two "pokey bushes" that actually leaned into the walk way at an angle. 

See them here? They look small here but they ended up getting pretty big after we moved in. Trimming them didn't really help because they were still very pokey and RIGHT in the way. 

Also, do you see all of those dead plants that look like piles of hay? Those are some sort of plant that looks like thick grass. Not my fav. even when they turned green. Just ugly. 

Anyways...ever since we moved in I have been wanting to rip all of that out. I think I have brought it up every day for the past year. John is VERY helpful but for some reason there was always something else for us to get done first. 

Finally one day I went out and dug out all of those grassy plants and used some branch trimmers and my little jigsaw to awkwardly cut out the pokey bushes. Now all john has to do is dig out the roots! And I know he will want to now, because until then it's going to look bare and ugly. So, I made it a priority. Tricky eh? 

Another annoying thing about our entry way area is that leaves always get blown into that area and there's always a big pile of leaves by our front door. 

couldn't stand it. 

So, my whole vision for that area was to build a little short fence. It would keep out the majority of the leaves and line the sidewalk nicely. Then of course I will plant some pretty bushes/flowers and made the front pretty. 

Today while I was perusing our neighborhood Facebook page I noticed someone had just posted about all of these fence posts they wanted to get rid of before a showing of their house that evening.

They had just replaced half of their fence. They had a dog that tore that poor fence apart. But only about halfway up!

*BING* that was my chance!

A lot of people showed interest but couldn't come till later. She wanted them gone right then. 

I told her I could go get them. So I got the kids in the car and filled our car with a little bit of gas that was in a gas bucket because we basically had no gas in the car. I took out the back seats and we went on our way. 

You can really see the damage the dog did to the boards here! 

No labradoodles in my future!

I went home and immediately started working on the fence. 

-First, I measured about how tall I wanted my fence to be and then I cut all of the boards about in half. 

-I I used the top half that was undamaged as my fence and used a few of the bottoms pieces to hold my fences together. 

-I happened to have the perfect size of screws so while the girls colored with chalk and picked dandy lions, I built the first fence. 

This is that area before 

The bush had been cut down to the sticks. So ugly. I had to cut it back some more so the fence would fit. 

Then I set the fence up. 

Somehow, as always, I mis-measured how long the fence needed to be so I had to add a few more boards. 

There we go. Much better. In this picture it's actually just leaning up against the bush so there are some gaps and it's not level. That will all be fixed when we instal it. No worries. :)

Next, I put the girls down for a nap and finished the other part of the fence. It's going to be an "L" shaped fence. One part of the fence you will see both sides, so I had to make the other fence double sided. So in this pic it looks like I made three, but really one is double sided. 

 

This double sided fence turned out to be a doozy. I knew I was almost out of screws after finishing the first fence but I couldn't stop! (Just my personality. Can't stop till a project is DONE!) so I used some shorter screws. They didn't reach the board underneath so I had to pre-drill some holes in the boards to get them to fit. 

Then I ran out of those screws. Haha!

But once I got to the other side, I had some longer screws that worked perfectly. But only a few. So I had to finish the rest off with little nails. Haha! 

You can't really see any of them so it doesn't matter.

Once I got all of those finished I started having MAJOR pains in my stomach. 

I already can barely move most days so this project was a little much for me at this point. (I'll be 33 weeks on Saturday)

Once I got the major pains I just sat and guzzled some water for a while. It was about 80degrees and SO humid out. I was sweating up a storm. 

All I needed to do was clean up so john could park when he got home. 

Luckily the girls woke up shortly before I started to clean the garage and they were great little helpers! 

I moved slowly and we got it done. :)

All that's left is getting some boards to use as "posts" so we can erect the fence. So excited! So far this project has cost $0 and is going to make the entry way look SO much better.