Fencing . . . and not with swords

Today was a day away from both work and blogging. Out in the great outdoors, breathing in the fresh air, and building fences. We had the fence posts installed on Friday, and the concrete had set sufficiently to allow us to start stringing the rails between the posts and nailing the vertical boards to the rails.

Now I remember why I opted for a career that involved a lot of sitting in an air-conditioned office, typing on a keyboard and moving a mouse around: I'm just exhausted after today. The good thing is that (between us and the neighbours both north and south of us) we got most of the work done. The bad thing is that there's still more that needs to be done.

If the weather co-operates tomorrow, I might take some poor quality Treo photos to inflict upon you. . .

My various tools got some workout, especially the Porter-Cable pancake compressor and the Makita battery-powered mitre saw. The latter worked far better than I expected: it lasted through about sixty cuts (of 2x4 pressure-treated lumber) this morning, and was recharged by early afternoon and kept up with the rest of the cuts I needed until I ran out of power. The compressor was attached to a rented coil nailer (I have a small 18ga brad driver, but it wasn't up to the challenge of connecting 2x4 and 1x6 pressure-treated lumber together).

To think that I used to disdain power tools! In the time it took me to manually nail two short panels on either side of the opening that will become a gate, my neighbour and his step-father used the nailing gun and completed three full sections. There was no comparison between the speed of doing it the old fashioned way and using a pneumatic tool . . . and I can make no claims about the "superior quality of hand-tool craftsmanship": my efforts were slower and less neat than the guys using the power tools!