Lights Out Films

House Project #2: The Fence

Our fence, I’m guessing, was about 40 years old. It was green, and held up together with rusted bailing wire. It took all of 5 minutes to destroy the 75 feet of old fence. The rest, well, wasn’t so easy.

Day #1, we attempted to dig out the holes with a shovel-like post hole digger. That didn’t go so well. We hit rock. So later that day, we went to Home Depot to rent a gas-powered digger. I was looking for a one person version, but they only had a two person one. One that required 2 large people.

I won’t go into the details of that day, but let’s be clear: I found dirt in my nose for a couple of days, we couldn’t go deep enough in some of the spots, I never want to see an auger again and the fence is a little wavy if seen from the side. We put up the 2 X 4, connected to our newly cemented posts, and that was pretty much all we could do in 9 or 10 hours of work.

Day #2: (A week after day #1): Amy and I went to Home Depot (God, again) and bought 2 gallons of stain. We thought that would be enough. It wasn’t. We ended up buying two more just to finish everything. We selfishly decided to stain the opposite side of the fence that faces our neighbor. In the rainy northwest, we don’t want to take any chances with having rot. That son-of-bitch better never get moldy. It’s soaked in stain. So, surprisingly, it wasn’t the placing of the boards, with 4 screws in each, that was the biggest time sink. All told, we probably spent 3 hours screwing in boards. Where we wasted all our time, of course, was staining. Good god. Staining 160 boards is a huge pain in the ass. It took three or four days of after-work and weekend staining just to get the whole thing done.

But we persevered, and I think our board placement and staining job more than made up for any imperfections. If you click on the pictures, I’ll annotate them via flickr to point out a few particulars.