Fence

The fence situation in the backyard wasn’t great, in that there were two partial fences. The first was our fence, an old green aluminum chain link fence about three feet high that went from the back of the neighbor’s house to about ten feet from the alley. On the other side of the property line, the neighbor had a taller wooden fence that started about 15 feet back from their house and went all the way to the alley, with a bit of a zig zag in it that gave us a few extra feet of yard.

When garage construction started, we adjusted some of the wooden fence to be further into the neighbor’s lot so the footers could be poured up to the property line. We took out all of our chain link fence and used some of the fence panels from the fence on the other side of our lot to fill in the last 15′ or so up to their house to keep things closed off, since they have a dog. With the garage going in, we didn’t need the fence on the other side anymore.

Just sharing a tip: farm jacks are awesome. In the past we’ve had a tough time prying fence posts out of the ground, but I picked up a farm jack and made quick work of it by drilling a hole through the post near the base, putting a bolt through it, and then wrapping a chain around the bolt and over the farm jack.

When the garage build wrapped up, we started work on our new fence. We ordered a Mondaria composite fence and Fedex dropped seven very large boxes off not long later. Unfortunately when it came time to put in the fence and we opened up the boxes, we realized they’d forgotten to ship us all of the posts. I called them up and they agreed to send us the missing posts, but they were all out of black. Rather than wait on a backorder, we got the unpainted posts and painted them ourselves, first with a coat of spray paint and then follow up coats with the brush.

Using the survey, I staked a couple string lines to get everything lined up properly and marked out where the new holes would go. We rented an auger but really struggled on the post holes. Eventually we got them where they needed to go. Because we had removed so much concrete, we used sonotubes to build them up to where grade will be when we’re done.

Another tool suggestion is the “Post Hole Digging Bar” a heavy solid piece of steel with a small tamper on one and and a narrow blade on the other. For shearing a post hole straight, getting deeper into clay or prying out roots and rocks, this thing is a wonder, and I’ve used it for weeding with great success to, particularly deep roots you can drop this thing and pry up those mini trees that get out of control or the giant dandelions with the root a foot deep that just snaps when you pull up on it.

Anyway, we got all the posts set in concrete, even in height and aligned along the property line with string lines top and bottom. Then we got the bottom rails installed. Here’s where we added metal mesh that we buried in the ground and tied into the fence in order to make the yard as difficult as possible for the common city rodents to get into. Next we put in the fence panels and a top rail for each section, removing the temporary fence as we went. Finally we cut down little vertical pieces to slide into the posts to make them look nice, and added post caps.