Back on the job

My house builder put himself on the hook when I last contacted him a week or so ago because he said that the results of the G2 soil study for the groundwork would definitely be available by last Friday and that subject to no problems being found, work on my new house would get underway in the following two weeks. This means that unless there’s a very good reason to the contrary, I’m expecting work to start by the 18th of February.

We’ve been through another rather dismal period of cold, rainy weather which I’ve just had to sit through and do practically nothing, but what the heck, unless we have the rain we’ll possibly have a drought declared during the summer with all that that entails, plus the ground could dry out creating other possible problems with my house build.

But although we have a couple of chilly nights forecast for the beginning of next week, it looks for now that we’ve turned the corner and the weather is going to stay dry, so as it’s perfect right now, it’s time to get back onto my fencing project.

I want to have the land behind my new house fully enclosed so I can have a dog that can run freely there without any chance of deciding to run off as soon as it gets the scent of a boar or a deer, which would otherwise be more than likely. But although I want to have a boundary fence all around my land, I want to keep the front open for easy access and for a more eye-pleasing aspect.

I’ve worked out how I’m going to do it of which more later, but for now I’ve got to create a boundary fence all along the long south side of my land as I have along the north and east sides and that meant getting hold of a lot more fence posts. When I went to the sawmill yesterday we established that they only have around 25 left so I decided that I might as well take them all as a job-lot

We agreed a highly attractive price for me to take them off their hands as they have no plans, at least for now, to make any more, and lucky I did as I’ll go onto explain. In fact there turned out to be 28 available so today I picked them all up and loaded them into my trailer. Here they are after I’d laid out the first few of this batch in the positions on the ground where they’ll need to be thumped in.

And here’s a shot that I took while the work was in progress.

So why was it lucky that I took the lot? Well, I was thinking that although the bare ‘anti-sanglier grillage’ is fine for the land behind the house because I’ll be able to plant bushes etc to hide the wire mesh, I didn’t much like the idea of having it in the front of the house where it will be less of a pretty sight. When I picked the posts up today, the sawmill had stacked a large quantity of rough sawn timber lengths outside, for a contract I expect, and this got me thinking about having timber lengths between the posts in the front, so when I got home I did some calculations.

After lunch I decided that rather than try to explain over the phone, I’d go back to the sawmill and talk things over. And lucky I did, because whereas I’d been thinking about acquiring timber in lengths of 3 or 4 metres, the sawmill only works in lengths of up to 2.4 metres. I was also shown some timber which was much more suitable for my purposes than the rough cut lengths that I’d originally been considering, so armed with my new knowledge I headed for home to do some more sums.

And it turns out that to achieve what I’m after, using timber in 2.4 metre lengths, I’ll need all of the posts that I picked up this morning, so that was incredibly lucky. I need to contact the sawmill again tomorrow to finalise things and I’ll go through my plans in more detail in another post, but after measuring and drawing everything out very carefully, things couldn’t have worked out any better 🙂