Slow and Steady.

Here's what the alley side of our property looked like:

What do you think of our two fences? How would you ever choose? Between the ugly peeling-painted-white-metal fence and the aging-pressure-treated-uneven-dogear-wood fence? Well, the answer for us was the taller one. Something about how we didn't want our entire lives to be exposed to the parking lot.

So late last fall, I removed the wire part. Pretty easy stuff, until the hauling away of a five-foot-wide roll of fencing. Since November, it's looked like this:

Not much improvement, eh? What can I say? So all winter long, I've been saying to D. how we need a hacksaw to remove the crossbars/pipes. His response was that I had to be able to list at least three projects for which I would use the tool.

For at least a month, I've been trying to dig out the farmost bar:

Oy, is it a pain. I can't get the left end out, and the right end is buried is a huge block of concrete. Ugh. I've been feeling a bit like Tantalus, battling this rock.

Then the other day, I just gave one of the bars a little (strenuous) push, and out it popped. In ten minutes, I had all but the beastly one out:

All that's left is hours and hours and hours of digging up posts, which I'm sure are anchored in concrete. Sigh. My poor aching forearms.

So it's only 10 months later, and I've done maybe 40 percent of the job. That's what I call slow and steady progress.