The Great Fence Swap

Update on my Dad: He's still in the hospital recovering from his surgery. He's doing well but definitely not out of the woods yet. Please keep him and my Stepmom in your thoughts and prayers!

Today's riveting post is all about fencing here on the Howard compound! Woohoo! ;)

First update is on the fence in the backyard. Remember when we "Gave Bernie a Haircut"? Well since then, we power washed the fence, I dug up a new garden bed and transplanted roses from the front yard to the back. We still need to replace a couple of boards but it looks SO. MUCH. BETTER. The roses should grow together to form a hedge and be about 5 feet tall by the end of summer. Definitely an improvement over what we had before!

 Remember before?

 Power wash day!

Here come the roses!

Ta-da!

Next up is the side yard. Originally, when we cut out the chainlink across the back fence, we had to leave this section up because there was no privacy fence behind it but changes to the fence in the front yard meant that the side yard fence had to come out too.

It was looking pretty terrible before. This section of fence was not only covered by weeds, trees and vines, but two additional layers of lattice and metal fencing laid up against it by my neighbors.  I talked to my sweet neighbor and asked her if I could clean all the stuff up for her and she happily agreed so I went to work. The chain link came out pretty easy and this time we left up the metal poles (you'll see why in a second). I spent an afternoon removing all the extra fencing they had added to the chainlink and went ahead and cleared out her section of side yard. She's older and has a lot on her plate right now so it was the least I could do!

All clean!

Here's where things get interesting. We didn't have the funds to replace that section with new privacy fencing so I wanted to find an alternative. We also knew we were going to be ripping out all the fencing in the front yard and Branch made the brilliant suggestion that we re-use the picket fence, especially since I had worked so hard on painting it last fall. I found these awesome brackets from OZ-Post that allow you to attach wood fencing to metal posts.

I removed the picket fence from the front yard which was pretty easy since they were in long panels and with a little planning and a lot of measuring, we cut the panels down to size to fit to their "new" posts. The end result made it all worth it! Not only does it look better, but it only cost us $20 in brackets AND there was dramatically less waste than if I had thrown out all the picket fence! #winning

Now onto the front yard. Poor little front yard, be sad no more, we have big plans for you! After lots of thinking and talking about it, we decided that we wanted to change the layout of our front yard. Originally, half was fenced and the other half was parking. We don't need 5 parking spots, especially because I should be parking my car in the garage in the back (Branch's truck is too long to fit back there unfortunately). Not only was half the yard designated to parking, but the fencing was a hodge podge of privacy fence, picket fence AND chainlink fence! And of course that chainlink was covered in more freaking weeds and trees. So it all came out. Now the yard is more of an "L" shape with 2 parking spots, a new walkway that will eventually extend to the street and we're gaining a little over 400 square feet of lawn. Totally worth it!

Part of us wished that we didn't have to put in a new fence at all because we liked how much more open it looked, but we really enjoy spending time on our front porch and with a little one and two dogs running around, it feels a lot safer to have everyone/everything contained.

When it came to selecting what style of fence I knew I wanted something modern and airy so that you can see the house from the road and the yard should look more open when sitting on the porch. I totally fell in love with this hog panel fencing I found online:

Inspiration picture

Soon it was time to build! Have Branch and I ever built a fence before? No. Could I have picked a less complicated fence to build? Sure! But where's the fun in that? It's taken a lot of planning, research and measuring but we did it!

Grass seed and landscaping is next!

It was a real doozy, but we love the way it looks! I'll be doing another post summarizing how we built it, but this post is getting long enough, as is.  In 6 weeks, the wood will be ready for stain and I plan on applying a darker stain with some red undertones. The whole front yard is getting a face lift so I'll make sure to share pictures when it's finally completed!

Love y'all!