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.

This weekend, I replaced the rest of the chain fence with the same 6×8 stockade panels that ran around the entire back yard of the house. I had no idea it was going to be such an huge project! It took 44 man-hours, loads of power tools, about $800 worth of fence stuff, and tons of back-breaking work. Quite a contrast from the last fence job.

Why did I decide to replace the rest of the fence? One of our dogs was getting out. From standing, she could leap over the old four-foot fence. While impressive, she was wreaking havoc for the neighborhood cats and was scaring children who walked by our house (the next door neighbor’s sadistic/tease-the-dogs child being the most notable). She was just doing her job (alarm system), but she’s supposed to do that from INSIDE. She never bit anyone and I seriously doubt she ever would—unless she felt her life depended on it.

Regardless, it had to be done…

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We started by measuring the amount of fence we needed and then going to Lowes to pick it up. We made a mistake so we ended up with one extra panel (we bought enough panels to cover the yard forgetting about the gates). Here’s what I purchased:

• 15 6×8 Stockade Fence Panels
• 16 4×4×8 Fence Posts
• 2 6×5 Stockade fence gates

• Gate mounting hardware (two boxed sets of hinges/latches and a handle/latch for two-way entry)

  We had to make two trips since the posts couldn’t fit inside Solid’s truck along with 15 panels.

  The job began easy enough: We unloaded the equipment and started to remove the old fence. Before long we had the front two sections on the sides of the house completed (with the gate installed). My Fein Multimaster came in very handy for this job as a vertical hole needed to be cut through the gate for the latch.

  After that, everything became much, much harder. The fence in the back of the house was completely covered in overgrown weeds, bushes, and trees. The job quickly changed from “lets put in a new fence” to “lets clear three decades of overgrowth and brush”. It took us all day on Saturday (4 of us working) just to clear away the brush and remove the old fence. This process involved bolt cutters, a sawzall, the Multimaster, my hedge trimmer, a chainsaw, an axe, two machetes, and lots of digging.

  On Sunday I lost two workers to tourism so Solid and I finished clearing the brush (dragging the remaining branches into the woods) and began what was supposed to be the easy part: Installing the new fence. It was 100x more difficult than before.

  There were three primary reasons why installing the fence in the back was much more difficult:

  1. The corner fence post was a metal pole that had my neighbor’s chain fence gate attached to it. Once we got permission, we took that old post out, flipped his gate around so it swung the other way, and screwed two metal fence hinges into the new wooden post. This required a lot of alignment and careful execution.
  2. While we successfully cleared away most of the brush and branches, there were still major root systems running along the fence line that had to be cut out to make holes for the fence posts. This was a huge pain in the ass and slowed everything down.

1. My property slopes upwards slightly from the corner fence post to the other end of the yard. This meant that the more fence we installed, the more we had to dig out to keep it level. The last five panels required some major trench-digging which meant even more roots to clear out! The last two panels had to be raised a few inches from the rest of the fence because the roots were just too think to cut out (very large and ancient tree at the corner of the yard).

   With the exception of the two front-facing sections, it was a lot of back-breaking work. I want to thank Solid, my father-in-law, and his guest for helping me out.