recycled fencing

To the left is a picture of our barnyard, taken this evening.

This is the project that I mentioned yesterday -- replacing our paddock fencing (which was wire cattle panels prior to yesterday) with wood board fence, which happen to be recycled sheep herding panels. These old oak boards have now been twice recycled by us, so given the strong recycling theme, I thought that it would be appropriate to post about this project today, Earth Day.

We originally came into these boards when we were invited to help take down and remove an old barn in exchange for as many of the boards as we wanted to keep. We jumped at the chance -- there's nothing quite like old, weathered wood boards! And these were beauties -- well, those that were long enough after cutting off the rotten ends to use. Not quite enough to construct a building from. But plenty to build a set of wooden fence panels to use in my dog training business.

Those sheep herding panels have seen plenty of use since then, they've been put up, taken down, stacked for storage, used for temprorary pens, you name it. But the past couple of years we've decided that we've gotten a bit weary of lugging those heavy oak panels hither and yon, and have decided to build a set of lighter weight panels. But what to do with the old panels which, though definitely starting to show some wear and tear, still look pretty darned good, and are appealingly rustic looking.

The answer was obvious. This weekend we replaced the wire cattle panels that comprised our pony paddock fencing with the wooden panels. It was a breeze -- the panels were the same size as the post spacing, as though they were made for just that (not by coincidence -- we try to keep all of our fence post spacing the same for consistancy sake) -- all it took was a few nails per panel, and voila! "New" paddock fencing, and a great new look for our barnyard.

We even recycled the wire cattle panels (can you tell we're really big on reusing things?) in another fencing project. This is at least the 5th time these panels have been reused -- when we have a new fencing need, we use them temporarily while we're waiting for a more permanent solution to arise. Here's a photo of The Map Man tying the panel into place to patch a hole in the fence left by the removal of the temporary pony shelter that we'd put up (and took down this weekend) for the new pony who didn't work out. What's he tying it in with? Why, something recycled of course! That's baling twine off the hay bale we opened up for the sheep this weekend. Nothing gets used only once around here.

Happy Earth Day to you all!