Solid Gold Backyard Fence

"$5000?! What's it made out of - solid gold?"

That's what bestest friend/coworker said when I told her what the final price of our fence estimate was. I was expecting it to be $5-6000. But to actually see it in writing is still shocking.

We want to fence in the backyard for 3 reasons:
1. Neighbors directly behind us sit on their patio a LOT. And they face the back of our house. So we feel like whenever we are in the backyard, they are staring at us. So we never go in the backyard. We'd like to put in a patio and buy a barbecue. But we don't want them to be gawking at us while we try to enjoy our yard.

2. We'd like to be able to let the dogs run around without their leashes once in a while. Especially now that Pickles is fully housetrained, it would be great to just throw her outside, let her do her business, then let her back in.

3. A fence might keep some of the neighborhood cats out of our yard. We can dream anyway.

So the fence guy came out and measured and drew a diagram with all kinds of notations on it. Final price - $4990.00. And that's with him throwing in an extra gate "for free." Here's what his estimate included: 6 foot privacy fence across entire back of yard (110 ft.), 4 foot open-weave fence around remainder of yard (205 ft.), two walk-through gates, one 10 foot wide driveway gate. I think that is more fence than we really need. Here's what I think we need: 6 foot semi-private fence across most of back of yard (80 ft.) - can have some gaps in it, just as long as the neighbors are not clearly staring at us through it, 4 foot open-weave fence closing in backyard from inside of driveway to other end of yard (approx. 160 ft.), one (maybe two) walk-through gates. And that's it! Timmy and I guess the cost of materials from Lowe's would be just over $1000. Plus Timmy gets to build it. What fun!!!!!!