Old Lady Tackles The Back 40 (Inches)

The other major project was The Back 40 (Inches). That has cost over $1500. So Far.

For too many years, I had been playing chicken with my backyard neighbor over the back fence. I had paid for a new fence back there somewhere in the early to mid 1990s. It began falling over 10 years later, but I was not in a position to handle the entire cost of repair/replacement again myself. I kept waiting and hoping the neighbor would say, This fence needs repair, let's split the cost. Meanwhile, I propped a heavy Charleston bench up against the fence, to keep it from falling down. And I let the trees and bushes grow to gargantuan heights. I was afraid to trim them: besides the bench, they were probably the only other things holding the fence up.

Meanwhile, two or three years ago, unbeknownst to me, the neighbor decided to repair the middle section (about a third) of the fence, the worst part. He replaced the rotten frame posts there, and, he must have come on to my property, because he took my fence front boards (the panels) and put them on his side of the fence. (He had no fence board panels before mine.) I know why he took my boards, and I was cool with that, because at the time there was too much vegetation on my side of the fence for him to put the panels back on my side. And I got my Charleston bench back.

But I knew I would have to deal with The Back 40 (Inches) before I could sell the house. There would be several stages to this project. Before any repairs to the fence, I would have to remove almost all vegetation, from the fence to about 40 Inches Back, to give room for the repair people to work. Also, there was a large tree in the northwest corner that had limbs that had grown onto that same backyard neighbor's yard. He had never trimmed those limbs, so they were just hanging on his property.

I used a professional tree trimming service to cut down that tree, as it required entering the neighbor's property (permission granted, of course) and potential risk. That was $550. My gardener charged another $550 to cut back the other bushes and plants and to repair the right and left sections of the fence,the parts not already repaired by the neighbor. He replaced rotten frame posts, but put the remaining posts and front panels back where they had been. That left me with a strong, upright fence, but one that had no front panels in the middle. Plus, removing all that vegetation meant I had no landscaping and no privacy screen against my backyard neighbor's house.