A big project completed

The House of Goodwill has some good news!  A major project has FINALLY been completed.  Unfortunately, it's not the DIY kind, it's the pay-a-company-a-lot-of-money-to-do-it-quick-kind.  In the interest of saving money, I usually choose to go with option #1, but this time we didn't.  This time the husband was determined to pay someone else.

The House of Goodwill now has a pet fence!

Anyone who has dogs (and sometimes cats) understands without saying the importance of the pet fence.  For anyone who doesn't understand the significance (due to being pet-less) - here is the reason it's changed our lives dramatically in the past few days: For the last year since we've bought this house, every time our dogs have had to go to the bathroom outside, it's required one of us (usually the husband) to leash up both dogs and walk them around outside until they've located the perfect spot.

If it's raining, they still have to be walked around.  If it's 95 degrees in the middle of the day, they still have to be walked around.  When it's midnight, they have to be walked around.  And taking the dogs out from any door in this house involves going down a set of stairs.  (So imagine two leashed dogs pulling you down a staircase multiple times per day.)

Perhaps now you understand the life-transforming joy of the pet fence.

Now we just open the door in the living room, and the dogs run out and down the stairs and into the yard, where they are safely contained.

Would you like to see this object of beauty?

We thought long and hard over this fence: what material, where to put it, etc.  We finally decided on a green chain link; I know chain link are generally considered ugly (and I agree), but for whatever reason, when I see one in brown, black or green I usually think they look nice.  We chose green because it blends with the grass and trees.

We went with chain link because they tend to last a long time, and we didn't want to use a solid material that would block the views of the lake from the yard.  It had to be see-through.

A second gate opens to the driveway

Can you see the fence in this picture?

(It runs along the slope behind the crepe myrtles.)

It blends so well you hardly notice it!

After multiple back-and-forths, we ended up running the fence through the middle of the slope on the side of the yard, directly through the monkey grass and iris beds.  The main reason was landscape maintenance - if it sat at the top or bottom of the slope it would have required weedeating along it, but by going through the middle it doesn't - the lawnmower can just mow along at the bottom and top of the slope per usual.  Also, for monkeygrass-slope weeding purposes, I can still access the beds easily from the top or bottom.  Having in on the slope incline definitely makes it less visible too.

My husband was pretty adamant about NOT DIY-ing the fence, and to be honest, I was a little surprised.  This is because he's installed multiple fences at our other houses, and he knows what he's doing.  But they were solid wood privacy fences, and the chain link seemed to give him anxiety.

The downside?  We actually had the fence company come out in October to give us an estimate.  But due to COVID reasons, they couldn't order the materials for a couple of months.  By the time they finally could, inflation had driven up the cost of the fence to over $4000. 😐

There is one funny fence story: last fall, the husband and I were out kayaking one evening still debating about the fence material to use.  We noticed a house on the lake with the same green chain link fence, and as soon as we saw it, we both knew that was what we wanted to go with.  It looked great!

As our fence was being built, one of our neighbors, Gigi, was passing by in a golf cart and stopped to see the fence.  She left to bring her husband back to see it too.  When the fence guys had finished the job, they drove to her house to give her an estimate for her own green chain link fence.

So, as much as I hate being trendy, I'm square in the middle of this one. 🙂

But I was trendy in other ways, too.  When the fence guys came to roll the chain link a week after they had set the posts (in the monkey grass), two out of three of them had poison ivy.  (Though not at my level.)

The third guy claimed he was not allergic.

My husband made sure to get his phone number.  ("I'll give him fifty bucks in the fall to come back and pull our poison ivy vines," he promised.)

And this is after he spent a year walking dogs around a yard and waiting for them to go to the bathroom early and late and in all kinds of weather - so I wouldn't have to.

Let me officially declare - romance is alive and well. 💗