More post thumping

The guys came back today to put more posts into the ground. The builder asked me to leave a space close to where they’ll be working so they have enough room to swing the arm of their mechanical shovel round without damaging or knocking my fence down, so with not having the whole of the south side to do, it should have been a piece of cake.

But it wasn’t. The first few posts went in OK but when they got to the first one whose position was fairly crucial, the first gate post, it hit a rock and wouldn’t go fully in. We had to remove it a couple of times and reposition it a bit but it still went in crooked, which will make things more difficult for me when I come to make the gate. Then when we went to bang in the second gate post that absolutely couldn’t be moved, a hydraulic hose on their tractor burst.

We thought that that would be it for the day but the repair was quicker than we all expected and they were able to return after lunch to finish the job off. In fact they were dogged by even more problems with one post snapping, others twisting and several not banging in deep enough, all due to the amount of rock under the surface. Strangely enough, for some reason there was considerably more rock on this side of my land compared to the other and it really slowed things down and made for a much more untidy end result.

In fact we gave up trying to bang any posts in up at the road end because they were only going about 20 cm into the ground, nothing like the depth required. We decided that when the time comes, we’ll have to drill post holes along the top end with a mechanical augur and mount the posts in concrete. That’ll have to be after or just before the house-build is complete and the builder won’t need to manoeuver any large vehicles or equipment up there. Here are some shots that I took at the end of the day starting at the road end.

In the first shot, the post on the left will have to come out because as you can see, it has hardly gone into the ground at all. The post to the right of it which isn’t shown is a corner post. I may be able to get away with it although it really isn’t in firmly enough. I’ll have to see how it fares over the next week or so while I’m working mounting mesh on the posts down at the other end after which I’ll return to start putting the horizontal bars in place on the posts up at the road end.

This shot was taken looking down towards the bottom end and was taken from about half-way down where we had to stop to leave the gap that the builder requires.

The next shot shows the two gate posts on this side. They are a bit more woggly in reality than they look in this picture but I’m sure I’ll be able to get around that when I come to make the gate to fit between them. At least I hope so.

The next shot shows the very end of the run with the first (or last depending on which end you start from) post sited inside the tree line as close to the boundary limit as possible, just as I did at the other end of the tree line where the fence on the other side of my land starts.

And finally, here’s a shot looking back up my land from the trees towards the road end.

So although we got quite a bit done, it wasn’t a very satisfactory end to the day. The posts have gone in nowhere near as well as on the other side of the land because of the amount of rock that was encountered. It is what it is, however, and I’ll just have to do the best that I can with what I’ve got. I’ll be starting on that tomorrow morning by fixing the tensioning wires in place, starting from the bottom post and working up and I hope that things go better for me then than they did today.