Don't Fence Me In!

Being used to wide open spaces, yes, even in Houston, I'm suffering from a little claustrophobia here. There are multitudes of fences - fences everywhere!!! And no two alike. I've thought for some time that I might do a blog on just the fences. The people here seem to have a thing about marking their patch. They don't mind living practically on each other's windowsill (that's for another blog), but they do want their fences. They have this thing about building some sort of fence, hedge, wall, barricade, whatever. They just want to be behind something! At times they're so tall that you can't even tell whether or not there's a house behind it at all. Not all fences are created equal, that's for sure! And building codes??? What are they? We haven't been overly impressed (or impressed at all, for that matter) by New Zealand architecture or lack thereof. Kind of like their taste buds. Pretty non-descript and not so inviting. So the other night for our own entertainment we took a walk around our block, and this is a sampling of what goes on all over Auckland.

Some are just great - one of my favorites.

Notice the paper hole and mail slot in the fence. And the "no junk mail" sign.

Woops! Did I say building codes? Deed restrictions? Everyone does their own thing.

Same here.


Notice the corrugated metal garage door. Lots of corrugated metal here.

It doesn't have to be tall, it just has to divide you from something.

How's this gate for ugly metal?? The Bastille?

For any of you who have tried using blogspot.com, you may know how frustrating and un-user friendly it can be. That's the case again today. It must have gotten tired of all my fence pictures, and it stopped letting me add them a couple short of what I intended. So I'll just have to circumvent the dumb program and do a little addendum post.