Our new (old) view!

No one could have ever told me I would be so excited about a new fence and gates!

While our old fence might have looked a little like a big version of a white picket fence, it was essentially useless. The vast majority of the posts were completely rotten, making it not at all goat proof. Our gates have never closed all the way, or just blew off their hinges, again, useless! But it looked nice...from a distance. (please notice: the gate is off it's hinges in this pic!)



With the goats working in tandem to knock the fence over and escape forever (or at least to the porch), it was time for the old fence to go. We hired Dave the fence guy and his son Matthew build us a new fence. Two weeks after meeting for the first time, the fence was planned and demolition had started. Not surprising, it didn't take much to clear out the old. The post were so rotten that a lot of them just toppled over when the boards connecting them were removed.



I hadn't thought about the time between fence demo and fence building. I was super nervous, but I just kept Bear's shock collar charged and got a Hyperdog tennis ball slingshot-to take advantage our yard/pasture combo-now I kinda miss all that wide open space!



But we hired the guys to build a fence and that they did! Now we have a 5 foot tall fence that goats will (probably) never be able to escape, and may even be zombie proof! This makes the vast majority of our pasture more useful, since the old fence was only 4 feet high and built only to keep horses in. I love that we can see through it. Instead of looking out a rotten white boards that we always needed to repaint, but were never going to, we get to see the animals!




We changed a thing or too as well! The greenhouse is now part of the yard! Well, it still mostly looks like pasture, but it's wide open to the yard. Now I don't have to drag things through a broken down gate just to get to the front of the greenhouse. I freaking love this!



We also added three pens along the length of the greenhouse space. We'll mostly use these for keeping our gentleman on lock down away from the ladies, but also potentially for keeping pigs or turkey later (soon!).



I feel like I could right a whole separate post as an ode to gates that really close all the way, that won't be blown off their hinges by a strong wind, that are solid, but light, that actually freaking work! Maybe I'm just easily impressed!



This ties our other major home improvement-the patio-in cost. While I can't imagine our house without the new patio, this new fence is kind of a game changer! It feels like we are one step closer to being actual farmers-but we need to make bigger steps, like getting a tractor and haying before we can come close to calling ourselves that, but we're on our way. This is going to lead to keeping all our male animals at our house, which means we will control when we breed our animals, as well as getting (more) different kinds of animals, and using our pasture more efficiently. So, yeah, I'm pretty excited!