Our Garden; A History: Part 5

One of the first things we wanted to do in the garden was put up new fences. The old ones had holes and were falling apart at the bottoms. And with big plans of training fruit trees up at the back and having rows of raspberries up the sides, we needed to sort the fences out earlier rather than later.

First up we needed to work out what fences and posts to order. We are responsible for the back and the right side fences. At the back we had 5ft fences but at the side we had a range of 3ft to 5ft panels. Plus there's a slope at the side, so that the smaller fences seemed even lower and the taller fences even higher. We wanted to reverse this, to make the fence look fairly level across the tops of the panels.

So first up I took out a tape measure and a spirit level and Garden Girl helped me draw a scale drawing of the site. This meant I could really see where the garden was flat and where it sloped and how many of each panel size I needed to order. I could also see where I'd need to use some extra gravel boards on the really steep bit.

I decided to order all the bits from a garden centre although if I were doing it now I'd consider a timber merchant as trekking to the shop to order it was a bit of a pain. On the other hand I was able to return some bits that I hadn't used. And the Garden centre does sell all the screws and such.

On the day of the build, Grandad South and Uncle M came to help out. My memory of what happened next is pretty fuzzy but I'm pretty sure I took down the old fences while they drank some tea and ate some of Grandad South's famous rock cakes.

At the back, the previous owners had a special removable panel. Maybe so they could put a caravan on to the lawn. Anyway, this meant that they'd "taken out" a half sized post by smashing it into the ground with a sledge hammer. Of course, that meant we had to remove what was left before we could put in a new post.

Most of the rest was fairly easy. At the back we attached wooden posts to the mini-concrete posts that were already secured in the ground from the previous fence. And at the side we concreted wooden posts about a foot deep into the soil. By the end of the day we had all the panels up and some of the gravel boards too.

I started to do some more of the gravel boards a few weeks later but Garden Mum decided to go into labour instead and completing the gravel boards remains, nearly two years later, a note on our jobs list.