The Pen

We're putting up a pen for the chicken house. Obviously it won't do much good containing the chickens. Its purpose is to keep the horses away from the chicken house. The horses tend to be somewhat destructive.

It looks messy now but it is still under construction. We string the shock tape up when we finish for the day. Heidi would just love to scratch herself on the nice posts. Giant horses rubbing on posts with fresh concrete is not good.

We notched the last two posts beside the gate. This is the method commonly used for a stretcher post or gate post. We are hanging a gate on the post but the cross piece here is for a hitching post. Lisa can tie the horses to it to work on them. I am going to add some steel cleats later or maybe a hemp lashing. The fence boards will also add structural support.

Big nail. They're called spikes at this size.

The tape is temporary. The far post may look like it is out of line with the others. It is. We put it there for the gate to slam against. We hope this will help preserve it when the giant horses rub on it. The perpendicular fence run to the back fence will start here. Doing it this way caused the fence line to be out of square. We did the math and we lost our perpendicularity by nearly 2 degrees. I know it seems like a lot but this is just the fence. In our defense, we were trying to keep the lengths divisible by 16 or 8 so we wouldn't have to make as many saw cuts. The long run is 32 feet and the short is 16 and terminates on the back fence line at an existing post. The gate is 4 feet but we lost 2 or 3 inches on the slam. We might be able to compensate with a spacer on the last post. We'll see. Is there an engineer in the house?

We got the posts on the long side finished today. Next is the short side posts and the fence boards.