Welcome to another edition of Saturday Morning Home Repair at DailyKos. We're a group a dedicated amateurs and professionals who can talk you through most any home repair, from the cable modem's blinky failures to wet basements to proper roof insulation.
So pull up a chair, the tea is ready and the coffee pot's full. Also, please give CodeTalker some special mojo, since he's up early enough to post this up for me. I'm boatgeek, by the way, your host for the day.
What are you working on this week?
Project Fence consumed over a month of our time this summer, from having the hedge cut down to planting the new vines and shrubs to grow up our side. We really worked hard on it for about two weeks, which got most of the work done. Here's how it went:
The original plan was to keep the hedge along the side of the house between us and the scary neighbor. The main reason is that a fence can only go up 6 feet per our local codes, while the hedge can grow as high as you want. Since our neighbor doesn't seem to throw away trash on a regular basis (moldy insulation in the driveway for a few weeks in the rainy season?!), we just didn't want to see him or his junk. This is what his side of the hedge looked like before, after we removed a low fence on his side of the line. Yes, that is an old washing machine tub along the fence.
Unfortunately, the laurel hedge we inherited with the house required ridiculous amounts of maintenance (two weekend-long trimmings per year) and took up a lot of space. Furthermore, we couldn't actually grow it much taller than 6 feet anyway, because we couldn't get to the top to prune it easily. In the middle of the late spring pruning, we decided to take it out entirely.
Originally, we were going to go with a bamboo fence like what we have around the rest of the backyard. However, due to supplier problems, we couldn't get the same species of bamboo as we had before, and the best endorsement the substitute had was "It'll take a few years before it looks really bad." That left us with a cedar fence as the next option. Fortunately, Lowe's Depot was having a sale on cedar lumber in that time, so we filled up the van with wood. Damn, it smelled good in there as we drove home.
Even though the fence boards can only be 6 feet tall, the codes do allow a trellis on top. We wanted to plant this up with thick evergreen vines, so we can minimize the view of the neighbor's house. That led us to putting in anchors in our fence post holes rather than pouring the concrete around the posts. We also used cedar posts rather than pressure-treated because we're growing food crops along the fence now. If our fence posts didn't need to be as tall as possible, we probably would have sunk the wood in the concrete directly, which simplifies the whole alignment process.
After dinner, I'd go out, dig a couple of holes, mix up a couple of bags of concrete, and put in a couple of anchors. I was getting a total time of about an hour for each fence post, which I thought was pretty good. After a couple of days of curing, the post would go into the anchor, we'd level it up and bolt it in. I like these post anchors better than the other ones available, since the posts are much more stable when bolted in to these than when they are sitting on a little pipe. If you can't see it in the photos, this style has a steel strap that comes up on either side of the fence post. The straps go down into the concrete about 12" and make a U underneath.
We did the fence in two sections, with the part around the back yard first. That contained the dog while we finished the job. Once the frame was up for the front part, the fence boards followed on a marathon day. My wife pre-drilled the screw holes, then my neighbor and I screwed them to the frame as a team. It went pretty quick--about 60 feet of fence in a day. This is the beginning of the frame for the front, with the finished fence boards in back.
One of the great things about this project was that my younger daughter wanted to help out as much as she could. We started her off bringing us bolts and nuts, but it didn't take long before she was swinging the ratchet on the 5/8" bolts!
I discovered a neat trick for making an even cut along the top of the fence. I clamped a straight-ish 2x4 to the fence about an inch and a half from the finished cut line, then used that as a fence to guide the circular saw down the line. It worked great, and was much easier than trying to follow a line by eye while holding a saw over my head. We only used this method where the fence changed grades, preferring to have a "rustic" look to the top of the fence elsewhere.
We topped off the trellises with some bamboo canes that came from a friend's house. These canes are all about a year old.
Here's a couple of more pictures of the finished project:
Look ma, no neighbors! Now we can't see the 3-truck parking area next door. This was before we stained the fence.
This pictures show how much yard we regained by removing the hedge. The hedge used to come right up to the edge of the gate. That extra 30" makes a big difference when your lot is 40 feet wide!
Since these pictures were taken, we've put in 6 blueberry plants, several vines, and a camellia. There's also a lilac and a honeysuckle on deck to be planted this week. In a few years, we shouldn't be able to see the fence much at all!
On a final note, I have to give some credit to my neighbor. I don't particularly like the guy or his house, but he didn't stand in the way of the project. He didn't object to us taking down his fence, or to us using his pathway to get supplies to the fence. He even helped us stain. So he's not totally evil. Just a slob.