Fence Finished! Yay!

Today, after getting home from another day in the office, I spent some time on the fence. Yesterday, I took all of the clips off the mesh so that I could tension the 3rd wire. That left me with a clear run at the job today. There were loads and loads of clips on the 3rd line and they were very badly rusted. I got blisters on my hand from the pliers and the repetitive twisting of the clips left my wrists a bit sore.

Today, I pulled the 3rd line through and tensioned it. The 3rd line is the line that holds the top of the dog mesh, so it didn’t need to be as tight as the top two lines.

The line was tensioned and then I went along the fence and put new clips on the mesh to hold it up. There were a couple of holes in the mesh that I had to knit back together.

The mesh didn’t reach all the way along the fence. The mesh stopped about 8m from the gate end of the fence and it is a Frankenstein combination of dog mesh, welded 4x4” mesh and chicken wire. The 4x4” mesh is OK, but the chicken wire is draped over a 3 rail timber fence (the timber fence was also falling down) and only covers the bottom half of the fence.

I put up some new chicken wire that covers the timber fence from top to bottom and did some repair work on the timber work as well. Finally, I had to knit the end of the chicken wire to the 4x4” mesh.

The fence is now sheep repellent … the sheep should be able to roam around the front paddock without fear of them escaping. We enlisted our lovely little daughter to get some sheep peanuts and try to entice the sheep into their newly opened paddock. Initially, the sheep were very … sheepish. After they did a circuit of the paddock the sheep seemed to get very excited (or at least excited in sheep terms). The sheep wandered around the paddock and ate lots of seed heads. After the sheep had their fill of excitement, they headed back to their normal daytime paddock.

All in all, the fence seems to be doing the job and I am very happy to have finally finished the thing. HA HA FENCE, I WIN!