The itchies

All spring/summer we've been dragging our feet on fencing in our backyard. We decided early this spring we were going to go for it and given the position of our driveway (it wraps around the back of our house) we'll have to put a gate across the driveway and thus a small pain in the ass to have to open/close. (I did look into automatic gates but uhm, well, $3,000 isn't really in the budget. We aren't royalty like that LOL!).

Our original plan was chain link. The neighbors (with Gracie) have chain link which borders our east side of our yard. We only have to fence the south and west (the house stretches pretty much all the way across our property line). But, like I said, we've been dragging our feet.

At the old house we had 6' privacy fence all around our yard and it was SO nice and peaceful and just.... private. We loved it. It just always felt so "finished" and the fence was a great backdrop for landscaping.

Here, we love our neighbors and we love chit chatting while we're out in the yard so we aren't wanting to put up 6' fence. I'm not sure why we didn't think of this before, but we've decided to put up 4' privacy fence so that we have a "little" bit of enclosed in feeling yet we are still pretty open and able to wave over the fence and say hi.

After running errands, I traded vehicles with Ryan and came home to yank out some of the hedges on the west side of our property line. Ryan came home and we continued working on the hedge.

We had a little incident with Ramsey... she hurt her foot, so we asked our neighbor to come over (they are nurses) and see if they thought they could tell what might be wrong. In conversation with them Ryan found out that not only had we been yanking out ugly hedges but also poison ivy, poison oak and sumac. Nice. I had napped, played with the boys and done all sorts of stuff without showering. Ryan is HIGHLY susceptible to poison ivy... he gets it EVERY summer and it spreads rampantly.

So for now we play the waiting game and see who ends up with the itchies.