Fence Removal Options

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We have a 4 foot tall chain link fence in our back yard that came with the house. I enjoy having a fence to keep the dog in the yard for those occasions when someone can't (or doesn't want to) go outside with her but that doesn't happen very often. She hates being outside alone, so she's never back there very long before wanting inside. Besides that one thing, I hate the fence. It's so ugly and weeds are always growing up along it and outside of it. It wouldn't be much of an issue but the neighbors on two sides of the yard have 6 foot tall wood fences, so the weeds get stuck between the two fences. My kids used to be little enough to fit between them, but they've grown and they hated that chore anyways. Now we are thinking of getting rid of the fence but aren't sure how. We've looked at our options and the easiest is to pay someone to do it. I called three places and only one was really willing to do it and said it would probably cost $300 or so and that would include disposal of the fence. I forgot to ask if that includes pulling up the cement base on each post or not so I'm not sure if they do that. The other option (and much cheaper) is to do it ourselves. If we do it ourselves we have two options of how to take it down. Both options involve removing the top pole and the side part the same way and it looks fairly easy. The only difference is how to take the posts out. One option is to dig down to the cement footing and cut the pipe off there and then fill the whole back in leaving the cement in the ground (this is the option one of the fence places I called suggested doing). The other option is to dig all the way down around the cement and pull the whole thing out ourselves. The biggest downside to that, besides all the physical work, is that about a third of our posts lay very close to communication wires and we would need to be extremely careful not to harm those wires. We are leaning towards saving the $300 and doing it ourselves. We've talked about cutting off the posts by the wires so we wouldn't have to dig down so deep (the wires are supposed to be at least 18 inches down and could be even deeper than that). There is one set of posts that are probably in the same chunk of cement that we would need to pull out. I have a garden by that post and the cement is in the way of where I want to put some bricks to separate one of my flower beds from the lawn. Other than that one chunk of cement, the rest could probably stay in the ground.