A paddock in the making - part 2

Given the length of time that has elapsed since I last posted (we've been busy - very, very busy from sun-up to sundown, 7 days a week for over 2 weeks), I'll refresh your memories as to where I left off the previous post...

"But, our local unofficial sawmill has ran out of suitable scraps of wood, so, on our way to purchase "chicken" wire from the nearby co-op I had a brainwave..."

There is an enormous "official" sawmill, "Sutherland Sawmills" in Swellendam, our closest town.  I asked RMan to take a drive passed it prior to entering the wide open doors of Co-Op once again.

All we were looking for was the off-cuts - the "unwanted" scraps of wood that were unsuitable for sale to wood merchants.  Wood that the sawmill would happily "give away".

We were in luck - they weren't prepared to "give it away" but they were prepared to sell it to us at a ridiculous price.

Sutherland Sawmills - a local sawmill which
processes the wood from invasive pine trees

It was wonderful to visit the sawmill - they use every scrap of wood that they can get out of a tree - be that for beams, planks, poles, wood shavings and even sawdust. 

Bags for sawdust in the foreground, piles of wooden
planks ready to ship to the wood merchants in
Cape Town behind that, and our "planks" in
the far background.

Some of the scrappy pieces (similar to those which we purchased) get used in the making of trugs.

Large trugs with 3 "feet"...

The smaller off-cuts are repurposed into
attractive trugs

...and smaller trugs with two "feet".

The smaller trugs which are manufactured
by Sutherland Sawmills and then
transported to garden centres in
Cape Town

The "larney" wood is cleaned, holes are cored, and it instantly becomes spiffy fencing poles.

Pukker "larney" fencing

But, we weren't iterested in the "larney" stuff - we wanted to repurpose their off-cuts - their junk wood.

And, they had piles of it - far to much for trug orders :)

One of four trailer loads we relieved the sawmill of :)

Four trailer loads later...

A close-up.  As you can see, there is nothing
wrong with the wood - it was just waiting for
someone - anyone - to put it to the use for which
it was grown :)

... we had what we needed.  And at a fraction of the cost of conventional wire fencing - be that barbed wire strands or chicken wire type fencing.

Our fencing stretches for approximately 120 linear metres (excluding the two "stables" we have erected), and each metre had roughly 5 - 6 (sometimes 7) "planks" - thus 720 linear mtrs of fencing alone.

The white dog in the foreground is the cause of
our using "sometimes 7" planks on the fence :)

"Sometimes 7" was because we had to prevent Natasha's Pekinese, Griffin (I call him Muffin), from gaining access to the paddocks at ground level.

But, taking an average of 6 planks / metre of fence at a total cost for the installed fence of ZAR4000.00 = ZAR33.36 (ZAR5.56 X 6) / metre (at today's exchange rate) that equates to €2.43 or US$3.29 per metre - wood, whole and split gumpoles, screws and petrol for the genny.  We couldn't have found a cheaper way of fencing off the paddocks if we tried.  And that is without amortising in the cost of all the wood used for the 3 X 2 mtr and 2 X 2 mtr stables either!

And, as RMan said, "We're re-using wood that wasn't wanted"!  I'm proud of him :)