The Bell Family

One of the jobs that I have been involved with lately is the installation of a “pool” style security fence in the court yard. The old fence we had (as can be seen from the image below) was too dangerous because Laura could easily fall through, so we decided to remove it and install a new fence.

I initially thought that this would be a simple job (as usual, famous last words)…
• Remove old fence.
• Use the holes from the old fence post and pour new concrete footings to which the new fence would “dyna-bolt”.
• Install new fence.

Now it sounded simple, but let me tell you, it is never the case!!!

Removing the old fence was pretty harmless… The problem arose when I tried to bolt the new fence to the newly poured concrete footings… I bolted the first post to the concrete and it looked okay…. but when I tested the strength of the structure, the post moved quite a bit which was due to the fact that about 2 meters of the old brick capping was moving with the post!

This was way too dangerous because if Laura or another kid hit the fence at speed, the entire fence would topple over! With the spate of accidents involving fences, I didn’t want to be another statistic!

Of course by this time, I wasn’t too impressed as the simple job had turned into a very time-consuming and expensive one!!! I would have been happy to get a professional in to install the fence, as I didn’t really have that much time on my hands anyway. But after getting a few people to quote on installing the fence properly, and once we actually got a few tradespeople to return our calls), the price was astronomical and the methods suggested were pretty dodgy. So I decided to do it myself (with a bit of help of course).

What we decided to do was:
• Remove the entire brick capping and lay a concrete slab across the length of the brick retaining wall that separates the courtyard and the backyard
• Then bolt the fence to the concrete using dyna-bolts.

Now, special thanks must go to my father-in-law “Dave”, who at the time had some time off and spent a day removing the brick capping and “forming up” ready for the concrete. Thankyou very much Dave for this!!!!

Then on then following weekend, we got in a concrete truck and poured some concrete and smoothed it all out. On the following weekend, we got a friend of Dave’s who does some brick laying part-time to help place a “half” a brick run beside the concrete (which made the entire thing look like it had always been there).

Then, on the following weekend, Dave and I (with the help of Laura, Chrissy, Kerrie and Susie) installed the fence. As you can see from the results below, it looks pretty good, and is much more secure than it would have been if we had stuck with the previous method of installing the fence.

As you can see, we have Laura’s swing set (that she got from Santa) and a “see-saw” and slide (which Laura got for Easter, instead of chocolate). Of course now that Laura is getting a lot more active she just loves to play out in the new courtyard area.

I have also just installed (about an hour ago) a security door leading into the garage which now makes the entire courtyard secure.

Until next time, take it easy,
Jason.