Poor Hank has been restricted to a leash in his own yard for all of his 9 years. He’s a sneaky little devil who will start earning your trust, then leap over the 3-foot-tall front fence to chase a raven, a person, a dog, whatever strikes his fancy. There isn’t much I like less than screaming “HANK” like a crazy person when he’s run off.

The front fence on our lot was leaning and piece by piece started to fall apart. As it turns out, it was pretty rotten!

Jeff took each of the panels down to see if he could at least save the posts.

The posts are pressure-treated and not rotten, but he needed to dig each of them up to straighten them.

With hopes of another camping trip or two, the camper is still on the truck, so Jeff gave a list to the lumber yard and they delivered it right to our back fence.

Then the work began to install and level new horizontal supports.

We decided to just match the exact style the fence already had, but go one foot taller. When the snow accumulates, it’ll still be too short to keep Hank in (maybe we’ll shovel across the front inside the fence?) but with the slope, the fence is pretty high compared to the street level.

This saves the expense of replacing the posts, but there is less support behind the extra height at the top of the fence. Will that be a problem? I guess we’ll find out because we went with it!

Jeff built a neat spacer tool so I stood on the inside of the fence and helped with spacing, holding, making sure they were aligned at the right height, and plumb vertically.

We had planned on painting or staining them all before they went up, but when you live here, the store has what you want, or it doesn’t, and we didn’t want to hold up the assembly process, so painting comes next. Ideally, we’d be able to match the old colour so we don’t have to paint the fence around the rest of the yard!

Oh, but we guessed wrong and were just a wee bit short of lumber by the end of the weekend. Just one tiny little gap left!

Nothing another trip to the lumber yard can’t fix!

Now in progress is a new gate. We are making it slightly lower so you can see where the gate is (it’s kinda disguised otherwise). Then, we’ll put in some new front steps up from the gate. The current ones are super rough, steep, and just carved into the earth.

But with the easy ways out now blocked, last night Hank got to run around his yard without a leash!

He’s kinda happy. But incredibly untrustworthy, so he will still be in his secure dog run while we’re working and can’t keep our eye on the rascal. He’s already been digging holes, because it is the first time in his life we can’t stop him.

We had 2 hot days recently! Both coincided with fence building, and it felt so wonderful to be warm! Hank went into the river on one of our walks and Jeff threw some sticks for him to fetch. But once he brought back an empty mickey liquor bottle instead!?

While it was hot, it was super smokey from the NWT wildfires. But now it’s cold and rainy again so …. 🤷‍♀️