the walls I did like so:



first I dug a foot deep trench along the outside perimeter. I lined it up using stakes and kite string to keep the trenches going the right way. Luckily you can see it's pretty much flat there, so there's also not much up and down the walls have to cope with.



In the trench I installed eight foot long 2"x12" pressure treated lumber, using pressure treated 2"x4"s to join their ends together.



The upper section is the same lumber, 2"x12"s. This means that every 8 feet or so there is a set of 2x4's sandwiching the walls, making it about five inches wide at those points, plus at all the corners and places where dividing walls hit, there is additional support.



On top of these I just started laying down 2x8's along the outer wall and screwing them down into the supports and wall 2x12's with 3.5 inch screws. The 2x8's are set so they line up with the 2x4 supports on the outside of the pen area, but on the inside they overhang even those supports by several inches. Along the 2x12 parts where there are no supports, the overhang is even more. The inner walls are getting 2x6's for their rails. These are centered on the wall panel 2x12 instead of off center to provide more interior overhang like the outer walls.



Pretty basic, really, but LOTS of digging. Insane amounts of digging. So far we've trenched out 160 feet or more by hand (mattox, shovel, pike).



The fencing around the outside (the yard's privacy fence) goes 1 foot into the ground as well, all around the entire yard. That's a huge bonus, and we paid extra to have it installed this way.

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