Day 99 - Fencing

This weekend was spent fencing. Last weekend we were helping friends fence their block to keep in their two year old escapee, but managed to get the holes for fence posts dug on our block. 

We hired a post hole digger to do the job. It is worth its weight in gold as the clay was like concrete.   It cost $115.00 for the weekend. A good thing to note with hire companies. If you hire something on a Friday afternoon you can use it for the weekend and take it back first thing Monday and only pay one days hire.

The front fence has been completed except for the box wire that needs to go on the front to keep the dogs and kids in.  My dad gave us some wire from his place (he has 5 acres) but it was not long enough to cover the front, so we are going to bite the bullet and buy some new wire. 200 metres for $200.00, so it will be enough to cover the front fence and the right boundary fence which needs replacing.

We did the fence that leads up the driveway to the temporary gate.  I eventually want a sliding electric gate, but as this build is blowing the budget big time, I think it will be a bit before I get that.

The gate is 3.6 metres wide, so hopefully plenty of room to allow for delivery trucks.

We have fenced the right side boundary where it was missing. As you can see on the left hand side of the photo the original fence is falling down. We are going to fence inside of the old fence and then push the old one down once its all secure.

We also started pulling out plants to salvage yesterday before we get the DA and the bulldozers move in

This whole section including the trees will be going for the house. There are heaps of cheese plants  plus agapanthus that we want to keep and replant.  Yesterday we removed the cheese plants and replanted them against the left boundary fence.


Before



After



Mat didnt want me to post the pictures of the neighbours house, it is not the prettiest. As it is an acre block, we dont have 1.8m fences, so we need to be creative and block it off with other means. We are going to put some screens in, but hopefully the cheese plants will grow, and give a little privacy.

We dug the plant into the ground and have wired it to the tree. When it establishes and attaches itself to the tree we will remove the wire.

Blocking off the neighbours pool area.  We intend to put in another garden here along the boundary, but want to leave it until we finish building so they aren't damaged.

As you can see there are still plenty of plants that need to be removed. There are three palm trees that we want to relocate before this area can be scraped out and turf laid.

One of our good finds was a staghorn that was on one of the trees.  As that tree that is was on is probably going to be removed, we transplanted it to another tree that is staying

With a bit of luck we will have our DA through this week.  I was really hopeful until I received an email from Rawson today saying that Port Stephens Council needed new plans with Basix information noted on them. It does make me a little cross seeing they have been in council over 4 weeks now and this information is only being asked for.

As soon as it comes through, the trees will be coming down.