Digging holes

Location, At home, CA

The last two days have been rough on this old body. In fact, it required 2 Aleve before I went to Elks for dinner last night just to get going.

Yesterday I took down the fence in sections by sawing off the nails at each post with the Sawzall. Love that Sawzall! For now I just stacked the fence sections along the back fence and will deal with them later.

Next, I removed the posts of which very few were actually holding up the fence. Most were rotted off just below ground level. What really held the fence up were two posts which had been reinforced with 2 inch pipe which was then cemented into the ground. On these I used a bottle jack to pry them out. I also used the jack on a couple of the more stubborn posts which hadn’t rotted off.

I started trying to dig out those posts which rotted off using a drill with a long extension and a wood bit to drill into the piece still in the ground. This met with limited success. The real tools are a heavy duty vacuum to suck up the dirt in the hole and an ice chipper with about a 4 inch blade on the end of a hefty metal handle. I borrowed the blade from Don last night. It worked wonders!

By noon today I had four of the nine holes cleaned out and by 3 PM all the holes were done. I drove to town and bought 7 4x4 pressure treated posts 8 feet long and 10 bags of redi-mix concrete. By 6:30 this evening I had the 2 end post set in cement and the new posts painted with a product to deter termites.

Digging the last hole.


Cementing in the first post.


Painting the posts with termite preventive.



Tomorrow I will set the rest of the posts.