You can certainly remove it yourself. Here's what I'd do. Buy the property and move in. Leave the fence for a time until you REALLY decide what parts you want and what you don't. If you're going to have a tractor anyway, you can likely pull the posts with it. If they're in concrete, you may need to scratch up the surface - maybe with a backhoe. Remember that you'll also need to get rid of the posts - an expensive proposition if they had nubs of concrete on each one.
Good luck!
Mike
I really like what Mike wrote. Especially the part about moving in and not doing anything with it for awhile. Whithout knowing your life story, or your experience with country living, I can tell you that what you "think" you want will change the longer you live there.
If and when you decide to take out the fence, you have several options for getting it out. Having a tractor with a loader would really help. Depending on how much land you have, and your budget, the bigger the tractor, more powerful that it is, the more lifting strength the loader will have. The same applies for the rear 3pt lift. Either can be used for getting posts out of the ground. If your soil is sandy, and the posts are set in concrete, like I'd expect them to be, you might be able to just pull them out without any effort. If it's hard packed clay, and you have a small tractor, it might be quite a challenge to get them out. The only way to know for sure is to get started on it and find out what you have.
Before pulling the posts, you'll want to cut off the rails. A cutting torch is going to be the easiest, but it's the most expensive. You have to buy the torch and hoses, then rent the bottles. And of course, you have to pay to fill the bottles. Nothing will cut metal like a torch, so it might be something that you want to have anyway.
A sawzall with metal blades will cut the pipe too, but it's an effort. Cordless will have to have batteries recharged all the time, and a good cordless sawzall is expensive. The batteries are too, but it's something that is good to have and you pretty much have to have a good set of cordless tools anyway. If power is available, and you can get to the fence with extension cords, a corded sawzall will have more power and you wont have to wait for batteries to charge.
A big pipe cutter will make cutting the pipe rails a simple task of just spinning it around the pipe. Every turn, you tighten it up an dpretty soon, you've cut through the pipe. It's very time consuming, but if you are not in a hurry and don't want to spend allot of money on tools, it should work for you.
I'd buy a torch and cut them with that.
Depending on what you are going to do with the land, and if you have a tractor or not, you can also cut the posts off at the top of the concrete. In my experience, most of the time, the concrete is well below the height of the grass and soil around it. I dig around the base of the post down as far as I can get, then I cut the pipe with my torch. Then I fill in the area with dirt and in a few months, you'll never know where that post was. I do this fairly often for clients who want a pole gone, but don't want to desturb their lawn or spend any more then they have to. This way, I'm done very quickly, which means less money that my clients have to pay.
You can also try posting an add on craigslist for free metal pipe fencing. They have to remove it themselves, but get to keep all of it. I've seen allot of this with wood fences and cyclone fences. I don't know if it would work for you in your area, but it's free to place an add on craiglist, so you're not out anything. Who answers and what they are like to deal with is your biggest gamble.
My brother did this with some fence he wanted to go away. He had a father/son show up who did a really nice, really clean job for a bunch of it. They got what they wanted, but there was still some left. He tried another ad, and got some slobs who didn't do as good of a job and now he's going to have to deal with fence clips in his pasture.
Congratulations on your purchase and welcome to TBN.
Eddie
Mike
