My fence is a joke.

My fiancé and I are renting our current house.  The property has a huge yard which although is very nice, unfortunately came unfenced.  Not knowing how long we would be renting the house (and being the poor college students that we are), we decided to fence the yard as cheaply as possible.  The solution?  2 150′ rolls of 48″ poultry netting ($40), 10 5′ metal fence posts ($40), 10 4′ metal fence posts ($30), and 10′ of PVC piping ($3) = $113 to fence in enough backyard to allow the dogs to stretch their legs.  Why the PVC you ask?  To lengthen the 4′ accidentally purchased metal fence posts to 5′ ones (oh how I love being engaged to an engineer … ha!).  And how did we attach the “fencing” to the fence posts?  Zip ties.  Ingenious, I know.  (I guess I’ll add in another $2 to the fencing costs for the zip ties, bringing the total to a cool $115.)  I’m sure our neighbors love looking at our “fence”.  But hey, at least it proves we’re crafty and frugal, right?

An award-winning fence ...

Now the real question is – does the fence “work” (i.e., does it contain my wild animals)?  Kinda.  For the most part, the dogs respect the fencing and stay inside its boundaries.  But sometimes, some of the dogs squeeze under the fence and some of the dogs jump over the fence.  Thankfully their recalls are solid and apparently they love us enough not to want to wander off anywhere (they almost always come back under/over the fence immediately).  I’m not quite sure why they do it since they know this is not an appropriate behavior – the only plausible reason is they must think it’s some kind of sick joke to prove how ridiculous our fence is.  Sigh …