Bye Bye Ringo

Ringo is our neighbor's dog. He isn't very friendly and he barks A LOT. Because there is no fence along the side of our house we can see him running around the backyard and he can see us, and when he does, he barks (A LOT). More importantly though, because there is no fence along the side of the house, we don't have access to the side of the house. So, if anything ever goes wrong we have to wait till our neighbor is home, ask if she can put Ringo away, and then go tend to whatever we need to. This is rather annoying. And, a portion of the unfenced area is our property, so we've had it on the list to put a fence up, and we're finally getting around to it.

Here is what the fence looked like before

So the existing fence is about 15 feet long, but it pretty much turns a 90 degree angle and runs into the house once the back of the house actually starts.

The problem we immediately ran into is that we couldn't buy pre-built fences like this ANYWHERE. They were SORT OF similar, but didn't really look like it enough. We checked Home Depot, Sears, Lowe's, Economy, Truit and White, Ashby......no one sold it. So we had to go to Home Depot, buy all the supplies for it, cut it all down to the right size, and then build it in place. Much more of a hassle, but hey, you gotta do what you gotta do.

So, yesterday we cut the part that runs into the house away, dug the holes for the concrete, poured the concrete, put in the posts, and got the slats all in. Chris' friend Luke came by in the afternoon to help (thank god) or else there's no way we would have gotten that all done. It was important to at least get that done so Ringo couldn't get into our backyard when the neighbor let him out. We didn't get the lattice part done, but that can wait and isn't a neccesity, it just finishes it off (we'll also cut the posts down to size when the lattice goes in)

(we had to make the fence run at a slight angle so that the neighbor could still open her gate at the end of her driveway)

It was a long day, but we got it all done, yay!!!

The roof is also coming along EXCELLENTLY. It looks great! The workers are really nice, polite, and work extremely hard.

Day 2 of the roof

(this is a good picture that shows how we didn't have access to this side of the house before)

Day 3

They still need about a day and a half between shingling the turret (not fun) finishing the gutters and all the other finishing touches. They said it would take about 5 days though, so they're right on schedule. We chose "weathered wood" and for the shingles and "stone/slate gray" for the gutters and I really like the two together. When we finally get to painting the house (whenever that will be) we'll probably paint it a dirty white and go with the gray/blue that the gutters are for the trim.

It's coming along though and it looks great!