1250 Feet Of Fencing

The side 1250 feet is cleared and all the poles and t posts are in place.  Now it's time to stretch and 

install the wire.

We are using the Red Brand four foot high 2x4 Non Climb Horse Fencing.  This will keep or at least deter other animals from coming in and also keep the goats in.  Since Mike and I are doing this ourselves we decided to use the 100 foot rolls.  It's just easier for us to handle.

We also needed a way to unroll the wire that wouldn't be too hard.  Since we are going through the woods we can't unroll it on the ground and lift up.  Mike came up with an "unwinder" to help us.  He attached a heavy chain to a 2x6 piece of wood.  We used a pole to get the chain through the middle hole of the fence.  After we did that we stood the roll up on the piece of wood.  Then we attached the chain to the tractor auger arm using a swivel hook.  This will help us unroll the fence.

We are ready to roll...or unroll in this case.  We could not live without this tractor, lol.  It has definitely paid for itself with all of the crazy things it has done for us.  As you can see Mike twisted his ankle so this is going to be a slower job. 

Poles are ready for wire fencing.

We used fencing staples to get the end of the wire attached to the corner pole.  While Mike slowly pulled the tractor forward I unrolled the wire and loosely attached it to the t posts so it wouldn't fall over.  The t posts are set every 10 feet but I only tied the wire every 30 feet or so.

The first section is pulled, tightened and stapled in.

And back to the house for the next roll:

We start out by nailing that starting section of the fence to the Pole and overlapping the last section:

We do the same thing to unroll it for 100 feet.  Since the wire is in 100 foot rolls we placed our main poles about 97 feet apart so we would have enough to staple into each pole.   Our t-posts are 10 feet apart.



Mike is hooking up the wire fence stretcher bar:

Once the bar is hooked to the fence wire we can use a chain to wrap it around the tractor bucket...then Mike will slowly pull while I go back and take off the temporary ties:

How the fence looks before we pull it tight.

Time to gently pull:

Once the fence is tight Mike staples it into the wood post:

Then he uses the cutoff wheel to cut the extra part off:

 This is about 300 feet finished:

And the next 200 feet:

This was a rougher area but we got it done.  Originally we couldn't see through this area and the hole used to be flooded.  We did a nice job going down the hole and back up the other side.  The side fence is done:

Gotta loves those pictures.  It makes it look so easy, lol.  There was a lot of prep work involved for this side.  We had massive amounts of clearing and tree cutting before we could even begin with the fencing.  This was our hardest and longest area to fence so I'm glad it's finished.  Setting the poles and doing the wire actually isn't very hard.  It was the clearing that was the worst.


That's all for today.  Next week we will be taking a big tree down that is close to the building.