Fancy Fencing

It has been a while since any update. There is a good reason for this. Grandma Ann is visiting and we have been spending time vacationing with her. We drove down to the Oregon coast for a few days, chiefly to watch the kids playing on the beach, to judge from the pictures we brought back.

The sheep are settling in nicely to their new home. They are getting into a good routine of going out on pasture all day, eating grass, turning it into meat, and then coming back to sleep in the old hobo shelter, which we will be taking down pretty soon, as it happens.

We did get one good long day of working done last Saturday.

We had decided we needed to alter the outlines of the barn yard to make it possible to drive or walk down the lane between the two pastures without having to through either the chicken yard or the pig yard. So a week ago Daddy took a measuring tape and an hour or two of thinking and sketching and came up with this.

More or less speaks for itself. Pretty straightforward.

We also put in one post and a cattle panel.

On Saturday we continued this process, taking out 4 gates and moving them, removing a panel and replacing it with a bar-gate panel, and even building a new feed trough for the pigs out of scrap lumber.

But right at the end of the day we were left with a glitch in the plan. Two of the gates, one leading into the pasture lane and one leading into the pig yard were both short of the post. That is, they both left a gap between the gate and the post when swung shut. The gap was large enough for a sheep, a dog or a chicken to squeeze through, so it had to be closed before the Sabbath. So with the clock ticking before our friends began arriving for Lord’s Day, Ryan did some quick scribing and found that a spare railroad tie in just exactly the right position would close both gaps. But after carrying the railroad tie over and setting it down in the gap, he found that the bolts sticking out of the gate post were blocking the new railroad tie from sitting in the right spot.

With the drill running out of battery, no hole saw big enough, and no access to an appropriate power tool, Daddy was left with no other option than to unleash his inner Mr. Chickadee.

Granted, I’ve never done this before, and that is not really a timber framing chisel, and it took about 40 minutes to cut both notches, still, I think it looks great.

Best of all, it fit the gap perfectly.

The gate to the pig yard closes with a 1/4″ – 1/2″ gap.

The gate to the lane closes with a 1″ gap.

And they can be close and locked simply by chaining their corners together.

And Daddy was not late for Sabbath!