Catwalk of the Goats

"I made my way to the poor child, who was one of the dirtiest little unfortunates I ever saw, and found him very hot and frightened, and crying loudly, fixed by the neck between two iron railings, while a milkman and a beadle, with the kindest intentions possible, were endeavouring to drag him back by the legs, under a general impression that his skull was compressible by those means."
—Charles Dickens, Bleak House

We live in more enlightened (if less colorful) days, and so are constrained by regulations recommending that the space between railings in a residence frequented by small children must not exceed four inches (sometimes 3.5 inches, depending on the jurisdiction)—smaller than the diameter of the head of potential little unfortunates. As it turns out, this is also the size of a typical goat's head, and so O. G. Sam decided that our stairway and catwalk inside, and deck railings outside, would be lined with goat fencing: a grid of galvanized steel with openings roughly four by four inches.

The framework for the goat fencing is galvanized angle rails, lengths of speed rail, fittings for affixing the speed rail to the stairway and decks, and lots of bolts.

Goat fencing comes in rolls of flexible wire, but we used heavier, rigid fencing.

The Sharp boys: Asher, last seen tearing down the old house, Dave, and Robert, Dave's brother, who came down from Minnesota for a few weeks to help engineer and build the railings (and install the steel siding—but that's a later post).

The last step was topping the railing with a wooden handrail.

You can see in this shot that we now have steps to the basement equipped with a bannister with a return to the wall at each end, as requested by the county building inspector.