Unfortunately, I won’t likely be attending any gun shows for a while.  One section of my fence has gotten so bad that I can’t put off replacing it much longer.  My dog, the canine escape artist that she is, has learned how to get out through the loose boards in the gate.  Fortunately she hasn’t gone farther than the front yard (and then comes back to whine at the gate to be let back in), which is an improvement over her initial escape where she was found on the highway over a mile away from the house.  I guess after nearly a year with me she’s finally settling in.

I got an estimate today for just over $1200 to replace an 80-ft section (which includes the gate).  That includes replacing the posts and all labor.  I was estimating it would cost me about $500 for materials if I did it myself without replacing the posts, which turned out to be in worse shape than I’d realized (after I cleared some of the junk in the yard I found that a couple of them had rotted at their bases).  So I suppose that the estimate isn’t too far out of line, given that they’ll be using better materials (I’d priced the cheaper pine fence sections at Lowe’s) and given the amount of labor involved.  So my choice is either several days of labor wrestling fence posts and fence sections into place (and more time cursing over the fact that the gate is slightly unlevel) or a few seconds to write a check.  Hmm…  That wasn’t a hard choice after all.