New privacy fence
Solid helped me install a privacy fence this weekend. I thought it was going to be a huge ordeal, much more physically demanding than any of my other home improvement projects. Turns out it was easy and not very labor-intensive at all! It wasn’t even very expensive! Here’s the rundown:
- Buy materials at Lowes: $240 for 8, 8×6 foot stockade fencing panels. $60 for posts. $36 post hole digger. $30 box of 3 1/2 inch nails.
- Haul materials from Lowes to the house in Solid’s truck
- Tear down old wire fence. Involved cutting the wires holding the fence to the metal posts, then pulling the posts out of the ground (was surprisingly easy, just rock back and forth and pull out). Rolled up the fence into nice bails.
- Dig post hole and carefully measure/align the post inside the hole.
- Nail fence panel to the post.
- Repeat steps 3 and 4 until the end of the fence is reached.
Since our new fence was about 1.5 feet too short (and I didn’t want to spend $37 for a new post and 8 feet of fence), we cut a hole in a post and ran the old metal pipe into it. Ended up looking very professional! It is behind a large shrub and can’t be seen anyway.
The fence panels and posts were not very heavy at all for two people and I would definitely say that two women of average strength could have handled it… No brawny guys necessary (everything was loaded onto the truck by Lowes personnel). The most time consuming aspect was measuring the height of the poles and making sure they were level. Overall I estimate that we put in about 5 hours.
I have wet the ground around the posts numerous times and added extra stomping to make sure they’re good and tight. After the fence has been up for a while and the posts have settled some, they will need to be re-aligned and augmented with some rock dust for long-term stability.
I’ve uploaded the pictures of the new fence to my gallery. You can see pictures of what the old fence use to look like in the “Kale’s first week” album. Here’s a pic of the new fence (notice how the top is straight as an arrow? =):
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One Response to 'New privacy fence'
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on July 24th, 2006 at 11:12 am
[...] If you remember, I installed a new privacy fence a few months ago. Back then, I replaced the chain link fence that ran along the property line between my neighbor’s yard and my own. At the time, the purpose of the fence was simple privacy. It was a fairly easy (and cheap) job that only took a few hours. [...]