Fence Posting

I took a brief tour around the security perimeter of Chateau Stevie this morning to ascertain the state of the fence in general.

This was a mistake.

I discovered that not one, as I had thought, but two cedar panels require new top rails urgently. This is a total pain in the rear end to do and usually involves level four swear words, but it turned out that there was also extensive damage to the larch fence that stands as a bastion between me and Crazy Joe and I used up my entire stock of level fours there and then.

I was disappointed to find that one of the top rails of the larch fence had rotted through, but I was positively enraged to discover the panel that forms the rear, southeast corner of the perimeter had broken away from the corner post entirely and was being held up by the tree. This will require three pressure-treated 2x4s, a car jack, some clamps, a box of galvanised nails and a hopper of level three swear words before the bloody thing is back where it should be.

I was so depressed about the prospect of this that I went back to the broken post at the front to see if things weren't as bad as I thought, vis-a-vis the amount of concrete I had, in my youthful exuberence, poured into the hole to secure the post. A little digging soon proved conclusively that not only were things as bad as I thought, judging by the continental tectonic plate I had somehow fabricated in 1995 from U-mix-it concrete they were orders of magnitude worse.

Sometimes I wish this curse of handymanism had fallen on other shoulders.