Backyard Fence Removal, Day 3 (Fail)

Today I was feeling better/improved, after taking some of the steroids. I still had a rough start in the morning, but again – this is something I expect, given what my chiro/specialist said.

I felt better, but not great. Liz and I talked a lot about doing yard work today, trying to get some of the remaining posts removed from the yard.

She was debating working alone. I was debating whether I should try to help or not. Eventually, we decided to go out together and try out one post to see how it went.

Just so it’s clear: Liz and I purchased a Farm jack, for the post removals. We decided that our prior approach wasn’t good enough, and the right tool for the job (to get the whole post out of the ground) was something we needed to purchase.

So today, if things go well, there would be little to no lifting at all. And our goal would be to let the jack do most of the work. And for me, to let Liz do most of the work, due to my back.

One major challenge: Liz purchased a chain from Amazon that seemed more appropriate for the task, but it ended up getting delayed on delivery. When we purchsed the jack, we bought a back-up chain just in case, but it’s super long.

In theory, it should work fine (we’d just loop it onto itself). But this was part of today’s test.

The Farm jack. Looking things over before heading outside.

Ready to go: the new farm jack, a base, and some overly long chain.

Despite multiple attempts and configurations, we couldn’t end up getting this to work. The hooks were too big for the hole in the farm jack. And the hooks were also too big to actually hook into one of the chains, themselves.

We tried any number of looping combinations, all of which didn’t work out so well. We got the post maybe a few inches up, but nothing beyond that. Even draping the chain over the jack didn’t pan out, as the moment it got some tension… it pulled right off (the lip on the farm jack wasn’t very steep).

It’s a bummer – today was a nice-ish day, and we have a lot of cold and rain coming up next week. It would have been nice to have just come out and popped these remaining posts up… but today was not our day.

I guess we’re waiting for the chain to arrive, and we’ll give it another go.

Related:
Backyard Fence Removal, Day 2
Backyard Fence Removal, Day 1