Building a Fence

So yesterday I started building a fence. I have never built one before but was fairly confident I could do it. My girlfriend had her doubts about my abilities in that particular field, but I was unwavering in my determination to build a fence.

So I started yesterday by taking out an old termite infested fence (sorry no pics). I basically kicked it down. I then had to dig three holes to sink some posts into them. This is where the fun started.

I had been digging for no more than 3 min. when, because of my amazing strength, my shovel broke. Now this shovel has a lifetime warranty on it so I returned it to Home Depot where I bought it. Turns out Home Depot no longer carries that brand of shovel so if I wanted a replacement I would have to send my broken shovel to the manufacturer. So I just bought a new shovel and also bought a pickax for good measure (might have been a mistake).

I got home and started digging again. I dug two holes on the two ends of the fence with little trouble (Well i may or may not have missed the ground with the pickax and hit the side paneling of my house on one swing instead). The center hole was a much different story. First I had to remove a little bush with some wicked demon roots. So i used the pickax to cut up the roots in a circle around the bush. After about 5 swings in a particular area i noticed a small piece of plastic i hit. Turns out this was a 3" PVC drainage pipe that I basically destroyed. But why that pipe was there or where it was draining to or from, I have no idea, so I just ignored it and moved on.

I eventually took the bush out of the ground. Next on my to do list was to continue digging the third hole. First i tried digging on the right of the aforementioned busted pipe. I hit concrete about 3" down. Next I tried digging on the left of the damaged pipe only to find a smaller PVC pipe for the sprinklers. So I went back to the concrete and decided to dig it out. turns out to be one of the easier parts of this job. It came right out with no problem. Being quite proud of myself I started to dig again. The very next swing of the pickax hit a 1" PVC pipe that basically exploded on impact. Water was flying everywhere (sorry no pics, I was kinda preoccupied) and filling up the very holes I just dug. I had to fight the urge to frolic around as a child would in the sprinklers (it was almost 100 degrees out there) and find a way to shut of the water. I shut off the water to the entire house first and then proceeded to find a particular valve that only controlled the water to the backyard. With that task completed I sat back and took a break so I could think of how I was going to fix this problem.

I ended up going back to Home Depot (third time in 24 hours, first was to get the wood to build the fence). I bought a small length of pipe, a connector piece and a compression pipe thingy. I cut off the broken piece of pipe and attached the purchased parts with some purple primer and blue glue stuff (plumbers probably know what that stuff is). I waited an hour and then turned on the water. Success!!! I could now continue to dig the third hole (it has only taken 6+ hours to dig three holes).

So I dug the hole, measured the wood, mixed the concrete and sank the posts (turns out I needed more concrete so back to Home depot for a 4th time). I then called it a night (mostly out of exhaustion but also it was getting dark).

So I woke up today and started working on it around 9am. The concrete was working well and the posts were still standing. I connected some cross beams and was ready to put up the final parts of the fence.
I think my dad is hiding from the camera unlike my brother-in-law's gut.

So I then nailed the panels onto the fence and the job was done, at least for now. I still need to paint the fence (maybe learn some karate in the process)
View from the front. I will fill in that gap with some dirt...later...maybe next week.
View from the back. The post you see closest to me is in the hole that caused all the problems.One more view from the back yard. I think it looks pretty good for my first ever fence.