How the cows convinced us to put up a fence

A few weeks ago, Brian came home and caught a cow red-hoofed (y'all. I actually laughed at that. Thank you for understanding) eating his grill cover. Just chewing that thing like it was meant for her.

Can we pause for a moment to recognize the irony of a cow chewing on a grill cover that probably tastes like what we've been grilling? Uh huh. Like hamburgers, and steaks. Watch yourself Bessie-you could be next.

Anyway, he "hey-ed!!" that heifer just so she could regurgitate it for him. Which was cute.

So besides the slobber, and stomach contents (*gag), it had a few holes.

That same week, a frisky little calf knocked a handmade pot off the front steps and broke it. The nerve.

(Dear Aunt Sara, need new pot. XO) As if that wasn't enough, it had a real live plant it it..... that I had kept ALIVE no less. Oh, now it's on.

When we first moved in, almost 6 months ago, putting up a fence was one of the top three things on our list. But, it kept getting bumped down the list for things that were more imminent, maybe easier…..and let’s just be honest here,  we had some apprehension about working with barb wire. BUT, now that we’ve got these cows acting like those two naughty Siamese cats from Lady and the Tramp, we needed to get serious. I have enough trouble keeping my plants alive (Ok, it was a succulent), thank you.

First, we drew out some ideas of how we wanted to enclose the yard. We decided that the “fence of our dreams" looks something like this.

Click picture for link :)

We have watched some videos and read some tutorials about how to make a fence like this. We are/want to be “do it yourself-ers” (read: gluttons for punishment) so all the plans we’ve made on the fence thus far are temporary. For now, they will keep the cows from trying to digest our property/kill themselves and buy us time to build our dream fence around the house weekend by weekend. Or maybe the kids and I can take a trip (ooooh. The beach maybe??) and  B can just tackle that fence while we’re gone (Like the deck). Just kidding. Unless you want to honey….

We technically have 10 acres, and we certainly didn’t want to fence out our whole section. So, we needed to decide what we considered our “yard”. Since we’ve lived here, we’ve referred to the cattle as our, “yard crew”.

They kept the grass short for us and we haven’t spent a minute mowing. We took that into consideration when choosing the size of yard to fence in. Whatever is in the fence will be our job to keep mowed. We also didn’t want to take more grass than we had to for the cows, even though they are naughty.

We already fenced in our garden beds, also as a temporary solution, to rabbits, cows and deer, so we used that existing fence line to fence in the yard.

Using a t-post driver, we drove in the t-posts to create the fence line we planned out. (Read about how we drove the t-posts in my “Adventures in Fencing” post)

Here are the materials we collected for the fence:

All the how-tos we read about putting up barb-wire fences stressed the importance of planting a post firmly with cement to secure the line and keep it taut and straight. Like good little diy-ers, we ignored that advice.

Being a temporary solution, we didn’t want to permanently put in posts. Since we didn’t have as sturdy a corner brace as we should have, we decided not to use the wire stretcher contraption, pictured above. It’s purpose is the pull the wire as taut as possible. Which is great, except we knew that pulling it as taut as possible would lean our insufficiently supported corner posts too much.

We used our ranch muscles to pull that barb wire and attach it to the t-posts with the clips.

The red box is it's own project, which I'll share with you later.

We pulled three strands all the way around.

See that big roll of wire? We would unroll it, VERY carefully. One of us would unroll while the other went along the line, yes, VERY carefully, pulling it tight and taut. We would then use a clip to attach it to the post.

Could we just call my lack of photography skills endearing? Thank you. 

Oh, the clips. I struggled with those cotton pickin', dadgum @$#!&!!...I mean things. Brian would say, “let’s race!” igniting my competitive spirit. He would clip his strand and I would clip….but really just struggle to...Oh it was no competition, my friends. It was only frustrating….for me. B would ask, like a sweet husband, “want me to do it?” to which I would snap, “no. Go away!” I was sure THIS time I would clip that stupid, stupid thing on. Ugh.

But, we did it. It was two days of hard work, in the hot sun, but we can now say we put up our own barb wire fence. I don’t want to sound like I’m not proud, but it’s pretty obvious when you see it that we did it ourselves. But it does the job we need it to do, and it’s another skill experience we can add to our “Adventure Life Resume”.  Which isn’t a real thing, and pretty much just means this blog. :)

If you happened upon this post in hopes of finding a DIY how-to on how to string your own fence, I am SO happy you’re here. But friend, fellow fence builder, please google or pin another post. I am not trying to advise anyone on fencing...But come back soon okay?!

Thank you for reading!! I am working on a special birthday post for next week, so don’t miss it! Put your e-mail into the “Follow our Adventures by email” box so you never miss a post! You can consider it my birthday present. XO, Steph