Jericho: The Fence Story

For a guy who thought he would be an apartment dweller his whole life, owning a home is an interesting state of affairs.

We bought this house without getting it inspected. We just wanted to grab a house in our price range before our lease needed to be renewed at our apartment. So far, this gamble has paid off. As we do little project after little project, the house becomes a better and better place to live.

We got through one of those projects recently. One of the first things we noticed about the house when we moved in was the fence. The previous owners had three dogs and the world's ugliest fence. I've put up pics before, so this may look familiar:

This was the biggest piece of white-trash engineering we had ever seen. It looked like they had taken industrial fencing sections, like the kind you would rent to fence off a construction site, and drove them into the ground. It was actually worse than that, but we didn't know that yet.

We knew they had probably concreted them in, as we found a chunk of concrete the exact shape of a concrete bag - we bet they let a bag get wet and set. Anyway, it was going to be a big job. We tried to think of ways to break up the concrete and rip out the fence. Steph thought a large metal rod that her folks had used on a project would be a good idea. We bought it, but I wasn't sure. Our neighbor offered to attach the fence to his four wheel drive truck and rip them out. As nice as that was, I knew that would be messy (in hind-sight, I should have accepted!)

I had an idea. I remembered playing with an old car jack when I was a kid. The type you would hook to a bumber and lift the car to change a tire. I figured if it could lift a car, it might be able to pull the concrete posts right up. Maybe if we found two, and coordinated the lift. I mentioned this to Steph's Dad, John. He asked me if I had ever heard of a farm jack? Nope! New one on me. John told us that four wheel truckers use farm jacks to pull their trucks out of the mud. It sounded like what we needed, eventually, we ordered one - at $40, it was a value - if it worked!

As you can see in the picture, the first chunk of fence is on the ground behind me and the farm jack - so, yeah, it worked. On March 20th, Steph and I struck back at the fence - and the fence fought us the whole way. I was worried that the concrete posts might have been under the sidewalk, but that wasn't where I should have been worried. The first piece came up quickly and easily. The second was a little harder, and they each section got harder from there. There was tons of concrete, some of the posts were wired together. A few of the posts were screwed together - we found that out the hard way. As we were jacking up one section of fence, I couldn't understand why the posts weren't seperating and breaking the concrete as had happened on most other sections. Then - POP! - the screw holding the posts together broke and the posts nearly knocked both of us in the head. Whew!

The fence tried to kill us a few times. We got a good look at what they had done to this poor fence. They had obtained (bought? stole?) these sections of fence, then they had taken out the bottom pole giving them three posts that they concreted down. Strong - yet ugly as sin. In one place, they had taken one of the cut off posts, about six feet long and pounded it into the ground, then they screwed that to one of the sections, before they added the concrete. But, the farm jack did the job - along with that metal rod and some other tools and eventually, we had a pile of fence and an overgrown yard.

We had not yet bought a gas powered lawn mower. We thought that since we have a small yard, a reel mower would do the trick. But, the yard is hard packed earth, filled with pits and hollows. We actually filled a couple holes with cuttings from the shrubs. The grass is more crab grass than anything. The reel mower didn't cut it. Pun intended. Our yard looked like a local church cleanup project.

The coolest thing about this project was that we knew we would make things look better when we were done. After the first section came down it already looked better. As we were taking the fence down, neighbors we had never met were driving by and cheering us on! We knew we were onto a good thing.

So, on the advice of a neighbor, we put out the chunks of fence with a sign saying "FREE" in the hopes someone would drag off the fence so that we wouldn't have to pay to have it disposed. Big metal fence = a big dumping fee.

It took a couple weeks, but one night we heard some noise outside. Sure enough, some other neighbors were outside taking some of the fence. This has been a great way to meet our neigbors! They didn't take it all, but they took about half.

We moved the remaining fence, cut back the grass and hoped for the best. We figured if it was out there for more than a week we would just dump the rest and consider ourselves lucky. About a week ago, some neighbors came by and grabbed the rest of the fence. Yes! We were excited, we were doing little happy dances. It was over.

Then they bought the fence back!

I swear to the gods, we walked outside and the fence was back. We don't know why they brought it back, but they did. They put up the sign and everything. We figured that maybe someone else might take it or we would just go dump it. Well, I'm happy to report that other neighbors came by and took the remainder Friday night. They haven't returned it yet, so we hope they are going to keep it!

A few days ago someone walked by and remarked on the changes to Steph. He said that we had changed the neighborhood! Well, I'm not sure we've done that good, but, you be the judge.