First signs of a fence

The first good-weather Saturday of the year last weekend meant that we were actually excited to work in the yard, despite all the digging and weeding ahead of us. We're putting in a fence on the edge of our patio, so while I went to the Wasatch Community Gardens plant sale Tai got right to work digging the post holes.

By the time I got back, he was nearly done with the five holes for this part of the fence -- it took so much less time than we thought it would. Probably because our clay hasn't yet baked into solid rock yet (July). The holes were about 30 inches deep -- the bottom six inches or so are filled with a layer of gravel to drain water away from the post base and prevent rotting, and the other 24" are filled with concrete for stability.

You can see my haul from the plant sale in the foreground. I got three feather reed grasses for our parking strip, two creeping mahonia plants to join the four others already on our north side, and a few veggie and fruit starts for our garden boxes that I'm hoping to not kill this year.

While Tai worked on the post holes, I got down to weeding. I guess our weeding policy this year has been "if we ignore it, they'll die, right?" I faced reality and spent the morning on my hands and knees getting rid of this mess:

After (I know you don't care, but this weeding caused me substantial physical pain, so I'M SHOWING THE PICTURES):

Brother Daniel came over to help Tai set and level the posts. I was making eight-legged enemies among the weeds so I don't have any pictures of the laborers. But here is evidence of their hard work:

Along the way I learned that you don't pre-mix concrete for post holes -- you just dump a bunch of the powdered stuff in, then add your water. Neat.

Next up for us is finishing the fence (hopefully this week, if we can get some cooperation from the weather), and leveling our remaining exposed dirt and putting down weed fabric. Before we can do that, we do have to take care of this little mishap:

This gash is more than a year old and dates to our appointment with the sprinkler trencher. The pipe was buried rather shallowly (and the trencher wasn't really, um, paying attention), so this sliced conduit has been exposed for the last 12 months. The wires aren't live, though, so we've sort of ignored it until now. We're hoping to get our electrician out sometime this week to repair it for us.

Oh, and we finally got rid of this abomination:

So now I'm sure the Smurfs are mad at us.

Cedar siding

We knew when we agreed to this design that our cedar siding would take some upkeep if we wanted to retain its color. Without a yearly coat of sealant, the wood will fade and eventually gray, and we want to keep it looking fresh as long as possible.

Even though the cedar was sealed with two spray coats before it was installed, we could tell that it needed a refresh after the winter weather and Utah sun.


It took both of us about eight hours total to seal, with the majority of that time spent maneuvering very tall and heavy ladders.


We love the red look and can tell that the wood was due for a fresh coat -- it nearly glows now. So even though it will be kind of a pain, we'll spend the time once a year to re-seal the wood.

(Also, we were sitting in church a little while ago and noticed this Bible verse from 1 Kings 6:9: "So he built the house, and finished it; and covered the house with beams and boards of cedar." We had a good laugh.)