Work Smarter, Not Harder

The current undertaking that is happening at my house this weekend is a new fence.  We have had up a partial wooden fence (being only held up by my crepe myrtles) and chicken wire to finish of the rest of it.  So, it all had to come down yesterday and the new posts went in.  We have a guy helping us out who has been doing all sorts of manual labor for many years and shared this trick with us and I am now sharing it with you.

We had some fence posts from the old fence that were encased in our concrete patio.  (Definitely not something we did).  So in order to save our patio and get the post out, Pat (the guy helping us) showed my husband a neat little trick.

(that's my sexy husband)

Grab your drill, a hammer (or in our case, a FUBAR), a hydrolic jack and a metal rod.

Line up your jack, drill a hold slightly higher than the jack. 
Hammer your metal rod into place.
Use the jack to pick the post up out of the encased concrete.  Pure Genius!

Do you see all the concrete?  I can't believe it made it look SOOOO easy!  We removed three posts this way and two of them came up like butter!  The third already had significant rot, so it busted at the soil level.

The empty hole after we removed a post.  That one was down there over two feet because it was a corner post. We set the new posts to the side of the patio.

Thank you Pat!  You are the man!

Oh and the other interesting thing today, we came across baby squirrels.  Why not show those off too!  This is one of the two we came across...who is now living back inside the walls of our house, NOT BY CHOICE!  We had them locked up and they were let out while hubby and I were at Lowe's and mama came right away to put them back in our house.  Down here, squirrels are worse than rats when it comes to finding a way into your house to nest.  Cute, but so destructive.