This robot dude (and the chair) was hiding in the garage.
All of my fingers are sore, and my knees are sore, and my back is sore. I had stomach flu all week, and I've been sick pretty much since October... so this is more moving around than I've done in a while but I am SO excited about all the work that got done today on the house.
For starters, the tenants/property managers still have a ton of crap in our way, so we moved it behind their car so they can't get out... Not that they were really using this car anyhow, but still. It's the thought that counts. Get your crap out of my way or I'll put it in yours.
Mandi and Dayla hacking away at the wall with scrapers!
This side of the garage does not have the 50's mint green underneath, but was just as flaky as the other side.
We decided to take a shortcut with this wall. Instead of spending days hacking away at every rough edge of the plaster until we'd removed all of it that we could, and then fine tuning it with the orbital sander, we only spent about half the day scraping away at it. Just the bits that were easily coming off were removed. Then because I'm a ditz, we had to run to Home Depot for rollers, because I forgot the orange bucket o' stuff at home. Mandi and Dayla did a great job then wiping down the wall with a rag and a mop, and got the first coat down. Hopefully we'll get the second one on tomorrow. (And hopefully I'll remember to take a photo.)
While Dayla and Mandi worked on the wall, Spencer and I were on fence duty.
We buried each of the poles the same depth, and decided to cut them afterward, so they would all be level. Still not sure if this was really the best way to do it, but oh well. In any case, you really have to put some muscle behind this saw to cut through the poles, even though I bought blades that were supposed to slice through metal like butter.
Another annoying note: The battery died after the first pole. When I bought it monday, I plugged it in to charge, and within 20 minutes, the light stopped blinking indicating it had fully charged. Then magically after less than 10 minutes of use it died. It wasn't like it was freezing cold out either, high forties today. At first I was worried that we killed the saw with all the work it was doing to cut through the poles, but after about another hour of charge, it cut through the rest just fine. Tools should not have attitude.
This photo looks a little confusing. See that black horizontal pole coming in from the left? That's top bar. The top bar was obnoxiously close to the last pole. Sad day. Should've cut two long ones so it wouldn't be so embarrassingly close to the end.
The opposite side of the garage went much quicker to snap into place once we had the hang of using the saw.
Once the top bar was in place, it was time for fencing. This proved to be the most time consuming part, because the ground is not level, we had to snip away at the bottom of the fence as the ground sloped up. We wired it in place as we went along, to make sure we were pulling it taught, and trimming in the right place. We ended up being a little over excited for the first few cuts and it was a little higher than necessary, but it ended up not being a huge deal.
The beautiful end result. Stay off my garage roof, y'darn hooligans!
In all honesty I don't think this would really keep kids from getting on top of the garage, because they could likely slip between the fence and the house, but hopefully it will at least deter them, and is satisfactory to the inspector. It was expensive, and a lot of work to put up. We didn't have time to put the fencing on the other side, and hopefully that will also be done tomorrow.
After this small fencing experience, I certainly feel like I am capable of fencing the entire yard (if I have awesome friends like these around to help) but fully believe it is worth it to pay a professional to just get it over and done with rather than fiddling with it on your own. I also was probably more picky about this than necessary, I went to a local fence dealer for black vinyl-coated fence rather than a big box store for the cheap plain old steel stuff. But I know that one day I will want the rest of the yard fenced in for the dogs, and I want it to look good, and match what I'll be getting.
