Reclaiming The Land

Well this won't turn out to be what you think by reading the title lol. Let me preface by saying, when the gal who owned this place before us had her perimeter fence done, on the west side they "missed the mark" so to speak, lined up with the wrong stake out front and therefore left out a pie-shaped piece of land, which they later enclosed with a simple 3-strand barb-wire fence. In the back the two fences were REALLY close together, but the wedge gets wider as you move toward the front, and at the very front it is more than enough room to drive a car in! After about 5 years of cattle, and another 7 years of horses, the fence was in really sad shape in the back, and one goal with truck money once it sold was to take care of that problem - and MY goal was, to reclaim our land when we fixed the fence. We did the first 100-foot section last weekend but I wasn't able to take pictures due to camera problems. Now that I have a working camera again, this is the piece we did last week:

Today we had some helpers:
Shasta

Zacchaeus (and Shasta again)

Rocket (at least he looks like he might actually be some help!)

Here is the end of the first section and the start of the second section. The old fence is on the right. You can see that in 100 feet, the two fences are already about 5 feet apart!

Oh boy, found another helper! Justin is supervising Randy's use of the come-along.
This is the come-along - yes, HOME-MADE! We didn't have one, and Randy has gotten quite good at finding solutions to our problems that don't overwork his bad back or his "older" wife lol. With his issues it's a necessity... and I am more than happy to take advantage of his brilliance to save my own aching back! It's truly a blessing in our situation that he has such a good brain for figuring out how to accomplish what we need done that we really cannot do ourselves. His motto - work smarter, not harder!


Cranking away, looks like he is working hard but the strap is doing the hard part!

The old fence:



And the new one, all stretched and ready for us to strap it to the T-posts! Also on the ground on the right you can see the T-post puller, which makes it real easy for me to pull out the old posts! Putting them back in to supplement the not-enough-posts in the barb-wire fence was not so easy, even with the post-pounder! It really wore me out, but even so the post-pounder is much easier than trying to do it with a sledge hammer!

The only remaining issue is removing the wooden posts from the old fence line. Behind these where the shovels are leaning (see the orange handle?), you can see where we put 3 green T-posts close to handle the seam in the fencing, instead of using wood like they did on the old fence. Bcause we plan to put pipe fencing up a few feet inside the wire fence, to keep the horses off it, we did not need to use the heavy duty wooden posts - besides, as you can see from the old ones, the horses just use them as chew toys anyway!

As for these posts, the half-dug first one took Hilary and I over half an hour last weekend, and I was NOT looking forward to having to dig up the rest of them. But SCORE the neighbor's teen-aged son came out the back door just at the right time today, he's visiting long-term from out of state and was quite amenable to making a few bucks - which I am happy to spend to keep myself OFF the wrong end of the shovel!!!! Especially since there will be 3 more, and 3 more, and 3 more... each time we replace a 100-foot section of fence!