Paradigm Farms Horse Retirement: If You Want it Done Right, Part 3

Wednesday, May 23, 2018

If You Want it Done Right, Part 3

I've written a few times about our saga with Maury Fence Company, and the mile of fence we're having to rebuild thanks to their incredibly poor work. We have six miles of fence, so we're very thankful that only one mile of it was built by Maury Fence Company. We had our trusted builders who built the other five miles of fence replace the first half mile of Maury Fence Company Fence. But then they had the nerve to retire and Jason and I both shed a few tears when we heard this news.

Despite the retirement of our trusted builders we still had a half mile of fence that had to be replaced. After a lot of discussion we decided we were only going to trust ourselves rather than another fencing company. We bought a post driver and Jason had a special plate welded so we could mount it on the front of one of our tractors. In the fall Jason and I used our new post driver to set new posts for a section of cross fence that had to be replaced. We actually did this fairly efficiently. We set 150 posts in about a week. That sounds excruciatingly slow until you realize we only had an hour, sometimes two, per day to work at this project.

Once we got the 200 posts set we spent the next five months we proceeded to find endless reasons not to finish this section of fence and get all of the boards on. A lot of the reasons were quite legitimate. It was often much too wet to be driving any equipment out in the field. When we had periods of reasonable weather we had other projects to do like seeding and fertilizing pastures, body clipping horses, holding horses for the dentist, vaccinating everyone, the list was endless. Lots and lots of things got in the way of finishing the fence.

We finally ran out of excuses to avoid the miserable job of finishing the fence this week. We've now worked on the fence for three days, but of course only for an hour or two at a time since we still have a farm to run. We've got a pretty good system going now for getting boards in the right place, spacing them correctly, and working efficiently. Another two or three days of nailing up boards when we can find an hour or two to get after it should finish this section of the fence. Then we'll just need to put the face boards on and that should be a quick and easy job.

The worst is yet to come. The last portion of the mile of fence that needs replacing is a quarter mile of fence along the driveway. We intentionally practiced on the cross fence first as it isn't as easy as it seems at first glance to build a straight fence. Once we finish this section of fence it will be on to driving posts along the driveway. I'm hoping we can find at least six months of excuses to avoid tackling that job but it has to be done at some point. Sigh.

Fencing seems like it will be fun when it involves riding on the trailer.