With the menacing trees taken care of in the chicken yard, the next order of business is dismantling the fences that make up the chicken yard walls. This was going to be necessary for a couple reasons. One, because the new aviary walls will be brought closer in to the car coops, making the square footage of the area smaller than the old chicken yard, the old chicken yard fences would be redundant. Secondly, the posts for the old chicken yard fences are starting to rot at the bases and as such, would've needed reinforcing to keep the fences standing upright. Plus, I can use these fence panels in the construction of the aviary walls later on. Some of the posts for the old fence, especially on the east side of the chicken yard, which are newer, may be salvageable, especially after breaking the concrete from around the bases of the posts, allowing me to further set up the aviary walls with what I have available. The fence panels that were made for the west wall of the chicken yard were done cheaply, using only two 2x4s for each panel versus three like the regular panels. This is fine as I can reinforce the panels with an extra board near the top for the sake of anchoring the chicken wire to later on. I had already used one of the old chicken yard gates to construct a new main gate earlier, leaving the other gate/kit available to possibly build the second main gate if that one starts warping too much in the future. The western fence is being dismantled with the panels stacked against a tree to have them ready for use in construction of the west wall of the aviary. The scrap PVC pipe and wood that was up against the old chicken yard wall will be moved, opening this whole area up for future use in any number of ways. Because all the posts were rotted along the west fence, save for two, the dismantling of the west side of the chicken yard was pretty fast. This also opened up the area, allowing me to restage the scrap wood and pvc pipe on the side of the storage shed where it's facing the chicken yard. This effectively opened up the greater area, allowing me to be able to park another vehicle in this area if I so desired. I did lay some gravel over the area to cover up the ruts where the old fence panels sunk into the soft ground earlier. With the fence completely removed all the way up to the north fence, which also opens up the gate at the north fence, I got everything staged so I can start sinking posts to set up the new walls for the aviary. Now for the east fence. This part of the job was a little more problematic due to the idea that there were old vines I had to cut up to clear out of the way, along with the well established posts that I wanted to be able to salvage. With each panel removed, we had to work the posts to loosen up the soil around the concrete clod so the post can be pulled up. Afterward I used the crowbar and baby sledgehammer to crack the concrete clod enough to break it apart from around the post. The first four panels going from the house north to the north fence were regular three 2x4 panels, nice and sturdy. Once these panels were removed and staged out of the way along with the posts, I moved on to the last four, which were made with two 2x4s. The pickets on these panels also were attached using a brad nailer, so the movements that were involved with removing the panels loosened up many pickets, causing the panels to fall apart to a degree. After looking at it, the panels that fell apart the most will probably be fully dismantled and reassembled using three 2x4's to make sturdy panels. Since we're not going all the way up to the house with the walls, I won't need as many panels as we removed from the old fence. The eastern wall of the chicken yard is no more, with the panels and posts removed, opening up all the area. The catamaran boat in the middle will need to be moved against the eastern fence with the other boats to get it out of the way so the ground in this area can be smoothed down, especially where erosion has begun under the house, as can be seen in the right side of the picture. With the east wall down, I will have to move the catamaran boat to the other side against the east fence where the other boats are staged, then also move the pallets that I had on the other side of the east wall for stacking firewood. The plan for the firewood will be to set the pallets up against the north fence, and build an awning to cover the firewood so the wood can remain dry when it rains. This will further clean up the area by putting these things out of the way against the outer fences and not in the middle of the yard as they would be if these items are left where they sit after removing the fence. Once everything is fully cleaned up, I can start drilling holes in order to sink posts to set up the walls for the new aviary. Instead of just sinking the posts in concrete as before, I'm trying to figure out some sort of way that I can put the posts in the concrete but make them removeable when they do eventually rot. Whether I use some PVC pipe sunk in the middle of the concrete to insert the posts, or wrap the posts with something like heavy plastic to serve as a sleeve so the post can still be pulled out, I want to make replacing these posts easy when they do inevitably rot away from being in the perpetually wet ground.
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