Working on the fence

I was awake especially early so I went out to the loft area between the two upstairs bedrooms and read then did my morning German lessons. After hearing Mary stirring, I went downstairs to make tea. After Mark and Cindy awoke, we had oats with raisins and nuts before taking the dogs on their morning walk. We walked downstream along the EWEB Canal then crossed Rt. 126, the McKenzie River Highway to Greenwood Drive parallel to the highway and along Greenwood Landing Park. There had been a light rain last night and we saw several banana slugs on the path along the river. I took a few snapshots of the slugs to send to Nicholas who seems amused by them.

Banana slug

After returning to the house, we went out to work on the fence. We put concrete in all of the postholes that had fence posts over to the break for the second gate. We used T posts placed at an angle to support the fence panels vertically straight while the concrete hardened. Mary and Cindy relocated some ferns and heather plants then worked on removing some of the English ivy on the bank leading to the McKenzie River.

While digging the posthole on this side of the property, we hit a few rocks that we had to remove before continuing. There were a lot of roots from the plantings along the property edge that we had to deal with. We used Mark’s cordless Milwaukee Sawzall to cut through the roots allowing us to get to our desired depth. Although we had used all of posts and panels that we had, we continued to dig the rest of the holes back around to the porch. When we started to install the second of three gates, we found that the gate had been badly damaged by the shipper so we sat it aside to return to Home Depot on Thursday.

We came in for a quick lunch of a salad of the leftover chicken and lettuce as well as potato chips and some of the Costco dark chocolate covered almonds.

Because we had a gap for the gate, we were unable to set additional posts in concrete. However, we could dig the postholes for all of the remaining posts and panels. In order to complete the fence, we figured that we would need an additional 4 panels and 6 posts as well as some hardware for connecting the panels to the posts. We would need six more bags of concrete and 2 bags of landscape stone. Mark placed an order with Home Depot for the remaining fence components to enclose the area that they wanted to use for the dogs. While digging a posthole, Mark cut into the coaxal cable running from the house to the satellite dish. We weren’t concerned about it since it is highly unlikely that they would go back to satellite television.

Dinner was enchiladas from the roast beef leftovers from Saturday’s dinner along with steamed broccoli. Mary & Cindy finished the 2,000 piece jigsaw puzzle while Mark and I talked about plans for finishing the fence and assembling the sauna that we were to pick up tomorrow morning.