Press "Enter" to skip to content

Author: Clay

Cleaning up and not posting

Published April 14, 2019 by Clay

So I’ve been doing work and taking photos and not posting about it on the Internet. I made the mistake of looking behind my house at the terrible shape that my fence was in. I’m also tired of all the vines, poison ivy, and scrub trees growing along my fence line.

  • Falling apart

You can see how the fence leans forward and backwards here. So, of course it all needed to come down. Me being the bright person I am, did it solo. Just a picket at a time until there was nothing left.

  • Started near the poison oak.
  • Then started on the other corner working back to the poison oak.
  • You can see how twisted the fence is.
  • Pretty much done.

It took a solid day to get to this point. Still need to take down the stringers and pull out the posts.

Leave a Comment

My First Gate

Published February 24, 2019 by Clay

So I’m not super proud of this gate. It’s a little out of square, but it works overall. It’s incredibly hard to build a frame that’s square by yourself.

It took me a couple of attempts to get it this close and it’s only about 3/4″ out of square. A carpenter I am not. I will probably use a plane to hide this mistake at some point. I might even consider pulling the gate apart on the north side to deal with this in the future.

After getting the gate hung, it was time to tear out the old fence and complete this project. This was much faster than I thought it would be. It probably took 2 hours to pull the old fence down and strip all the nails out of it. I’m keeping the pickets for repairing the fence in the backyard.

  • Finished

Leave a Comment

My First Fence

Published February 17, 2019 by Clay

So now that I have all my fence post holes, the next thing I needed to was see about setting the fence posts. This needs to be plumb in two difference directions and I needed a little help in order to do this part. So I called my father to come give me a hand for a little while.

  • The South Side
  • The North Side
  • Trimmed posts

It took about an hour and we had all 4 posts plumb, anchored and then poured the foam. While the foam is a little more expensive than concrete, not having to mix concrete and deal with that makes the foam absolutely worth it. Coupled with a 2 hour cure time and I won’t set posts in concrete here.

I was able to get all the stringers installed and the pickets hung by myself in a couple hours. Next up, building a gate.

Leave a Comment