New horse pen and no more donkeys

This was a great way to occupy the kids and get a lot done! The whole family was out painting (except the baby of course) and then when the kids got pooped we turned on the sprinkler and that cooled them off! Needless to say they were covered in paint...wish I would have thought about them having paint in the hair before I started....that is hard to get out!
The best part is that this pen is CHEAP and it works. Yeah it won't hold up nearly as nice as the expensive galvanized metal fencing--but that is around $100 for 10-12 feet and this pen would have easily cost us $600. And I tried looking on craigslist for that stuff but it goes FAST and it's still really expensive. This wood pen cost us $150 or so and of course it's a little more labor.
DH had to cement the 4x4s into the ground, then wait two days, then we both had to go out there and I held the boards and he nailed. We did a staggering pattern with the 2x4's so that the nails all fell in different places on the 4x4's as an added precaution against cracking.
We were going to make a gate out of the wood, but then we had some extra metal fencing that came with the house so we used the gate that was part of that and saved ourselves a ton of time.
Painting takes a really long time and with the heat out here we probably should do a second coat really soon.
That little shed is our new chicken coop. We are in the process of painting it red and white and making it look like a little barn--will post pictures when it's all done with :)
Another even easier alternative we found was Home Depot sells "horse fencing"--it's 6 feet tall with small rectangular squares and you use t-posts. That would have cost about the same. But the wood does look really nice.
Another alternative is wire, electric fencing. I ruled that out right away because of the kids. And what do you do when the power goes out? I guess you hope the horse is well trained by then, but that wouldn't work for goats or donkeys--they are too smart. The stinkers! Did I tell you we had to get rid of the donkeys? It was sad to see them go, but they break out of everything! This would fence wouldn't have held them one bit. They have to have the expensive metal fencing. They were constantly figuring out how to break free and then break into the feed shed! And even though they eat half as much as our horse, that's still $150 a month in hay alone...so we gave them to the Painted Promise Rescue and they are doing wonderfully well and will be finding their "forever" home soon :) I have her blog as one of my favorites and it is so funny to hear them all struggle with the donkey's name "Mephibosheth!" They named him "Seth" for short. We named him that because of his club foot--Mephibosheth in the Bible had a club foot. Well they were able to take him to a vet and get xrays and see that he is fine so that is good to know. I guess it could have been corrected early on with surgery but that was of course long before we had them--we only had them for 4 months. Trimming is all that can be done now. Here is her blog: http://paintedpromiseranch.blogspot.com/ do a search on "Abner" or "Mephibosheth" and you can see the posts about them.
God bless and good night!