Building fences

One of the major problems for us at the garden is the wild rabbits.  They are either getting hungrier or there are more of them this year.  So one of the garden projects that we had to work on immediately is building a proper fence to prevent the rabbits from coming in.  What we currently have is a make shift fence using metal poles and chicken wire.  It was flimsy and even if it wasn't, the rabbits would have no problems sneaking in since we have no gate.  I guess that's why the rabbits thought that we welcome them with open arms.

To build this fence, Pete came up with a simple design which wouldn't take too many parts and too much assembly.  He calculated the amount of wood, number of screws and other details like that.  We also went to the store to check on the prices of stuff.  We made sure we planned everything well since it wouldn't do to find that we don't have enough wood or screws to complete the project. 

Planning also involved working out how much wood to buy and how to cut the wooden planks so that they would fit into the car and that we wouldn't have to saw too many times.  That's because the store sells long pieces of wood and there are sawing tables for customers to cut into size.

Working out the details feels like I'm solving a PSLE Math question.  In this case, we needed 11 pieces of 1m planks, 11 of 0.8m planks and 22 of 0.9m planks.  The planks are sold in lengths of 3.8m. So what is the minimum number of planks did we have to buy so that we wouldn't have too much extra wood.  Also the planks cost 4.98 kronor per metre so how much did we pay for the wood?  Real world problem.  My Math teacher-friends, you are welcome to use this in your tests.

Anyway, we bought the stuff on Saturday afternoon and immediately worked on it once we got home.  We already cut each long plank into two so that we didn't have too much sawing and less cleaning up at home.  It was hard work to cut the planks into size and screw the pieces together.  Although ours is a very simple fence (it's a temporary garden, so it didn't have to be perfect), it took a lot of hours of measuring, sawing, screwing and hammering.  It was evening when we finished - 11 panels altogether. 

The balcony was our temporary workshop

We wanted to put up the fence the next day but it rained the whole day.  Today, the weather wasn't looking great but it wasn't raining when I got home from school.  It was cloudy and grey but it wasn't windy nor cold, so we decided to put up the fence.  Pete's mum came along and she was a great help.

There was still a lot of work to do before we could put up the panels.  We had to attach the chicken wires from the previous fence to the panels and that took a lot of hammering.  Pete couldn't bend his knees so it was up to his mum and me to hammer the wire onto the fence panels.  His mum, though old (67), is very strong.  She knelt down with me to work on the fence, hammering away.  We had to fit the wires onto every panel including the gate, so it felt like hours passed before we were done.

After the chicken wires had been attached, Pete hammered the pieces into the ground and then attached them together using brackets.  More hard work as it wasn't easy to pound the fences into the ground.  It started raining halfway through but it helped to make the ground softer.  If not for the rain, it would have been even harder to puncture holes into the ground.

After two hours, we were all done.  The chicken wires weren't long enough so we had two panels that were bare.  The rabbits could still come in so we would need to get those done as soon as possible.  But I must say that the fence is looking good.  Simple but it should do it job.  The final thing to do after attaching the last bit of chicken wire would be to attach a latch to the gate and then our project would be completed.  A simple fence, built from scratch, lots of satisfaction.