Building fences

We've been working to fix up a lot of the interior of the house over the past year, and with the warmer weather arriving our thoughts turned to our yard. We've had a lot of people over the past year tell us that the inside of the house is a lot nicer than they expected from the outside, and we're hoping to change that. Before we started planting beautiful plants, we knew we had to do something about our fence. We had a wrought iron fence around both the back and front yard was pretty dated; the white paint on it was rusted through and looking pretty shabby.



In the front yard, we would have loved to get rid of the fence, but with all the foot traffic we get on our corner, it didn't seem practical. We decided to paint the wrought iron fence a red-brown that complements the house color. We're really pleased with the results- although it felt like it took us *forever* to get the job done and some help to get it all done. The picture above shows the old, drab white fence next to a section we finished. Lesson learned this project: when a paint product advertises "phenomenal adhesion", its probably a good idea to get it on your skin. Hopefully the paint job will last much longer than the rash...

In the back, a kluged together set of wood, wrought iron fences, as well as shrubs, were used to create a barrier and privacy. Time had not treated any of it well. The shrubs had been hacked to nearly the roots before we moved in, so we had no privacy. Rather than salvage the fence, we decided to put a new, beautiful wooden one. Our good friend Andy came down from Portland to install it for us. Its soooo beautiful!!! And it went up so quickly! We couldn't be more thrilled. We still need to stain it and treat it, which is a big job, but we're already enjoying our new, private backyard. We also now have a new drive way to park our car off the road. We keep the (broken) automatic fence from the old wrought iron fence to give us a little security.

Next step is to get the plans from our landscape designers and get started on the irrigation, hard-scaping, and then planting. It'll be a big job but so worth it!

We have a bunch of pictures posted here. Here's some of my favorites:


Upper Right: Demolition of the old fence
Upper Left: The finished fence
Lower Right: Andy and Jon thinking hard on how to get the fence to work out.
Lower Left: The beautiful gate Andy