We moved into our home in 2015 and with it came an old red basketweave fence. And no trees. Mr. Ink set about adding trees and plants and making our back yard beautiful. And one year I set about replacing the truly cracked and rotting boards of that old basketweave fence, I replaced 23 boards that year. I stained them red before replacing them on the fence and it held for a bit longer.

Despite the old ref fence, our yard was not fenced in. And over the years as we’ve added dogs and foster dogs to our lives, I dreamed of fencing in the yard. But Mr. Ink was worried about his plants, so instead over the past 5 years I’ve been taking dogs out on leashes for their potty time. That’s a lot of time taking 2 to 3 and once 4 dogs out at a time to go potty on leashes. I mean, we foster rescue dogs, and as such, some dogs have to go out way more than others if they are still learning how to live in a house.

Last year I finally convinced Mr. Ink that we really did need to fence in our yard and we came to an agreement about it. But that meant that old red fence had to come down. After all, it was leaning badly and many more boards had rotted and split.

But, the rescue I work with does fence builds on a volunteer basis. We all get together and put in the time and energy to build the fence and the foster home recipient of the fence pays for materials. I’d been participating in the fence builds for others so it became our turn to be on the receiving end. When trying to set a date, the one in May that we came up with was the same weekend as Miss Butterfly’s graduation and graduation party. That didn’t seem entirely convenient, but in the end, I decided to go for it. I took the week before off, and scheduled the build, knowing that I had to remove the old red fence prior to the build.

The scheduling worked out well though, because my parents were in town to assist with the tear down of old red fence. It was not in good shape. Some of the posts had completely rotted through, so without the weave, they just came down.

The tear down job was easier than I had imagined and it ended up being that the hardest part was getting all the pieces to the pick up truck and then cutting them into small enough pieces to put in the truck and take to the dump. The tear down took one morning, the clean up and finishing of the more stubborn posts went into the second day. But it did get done before fence build day!