It’s just a fence

What’s worse than painting? How about, painting a fence? For two long hot, humid weekends? By yourself, because you are just no Tom Sawyer.

In the months after we first moved in, a couple good storms came and knocked down a section of our fence. At least, that’s how I remember it. And we spent a freezing cold night propping the fence back up, and there it’s sat, propped up by a couple 2x4s ever since.

Until a few weekends ago, when we finally replaced the fence around the majority of our yard. It was a fairly big debate about something that seems easy. We could go cheap and ugly. We could go cheap and low quality but not quite as ugly. We could go mid-range and be kind of satisfied but not really. We could go high end, and pay for it, and really have a lovely fence we liked looking at from far up high on our second floor. All of these options, of course, are assuming we do the fencing ourselves, me and Lou, because that’s how we do. The option of “pay someone else to do the fence” is not even really up for discussion, because, third floor bathroom/third floor floors/gutters/roof(?).

Sampling…

We went around and around on board type and stain color and board type and stain color and finally settled on the prettier, pricier boards. What, were you expecting anything less?

We did pay someone to remove the old fence and set the new posts but that’s where the help stopped.

About 100 boards were delivered, between 12′ and 18′ in length, and piled in our yard. We started on Labor Day weekend, and labored until the end of Monday in unusually warm, humid conditions. We did the same laboring the following weekend, in even hotter conditions.

Lou was in charge of measuring, cutting, and routing the ends for a nice edge. Then the boards came to me, and I was in charge of rolling stain on all sides of the board, then immediately wiping it in/off before it dried. Which basically had to happen in a matter of 120 seconds in the heat. What started as a desire for drip-free perfection soon morphed into the mantra, “It’s just a fence.” Well, one of us was saying that…

It was rough. Maybe it was the monotony. Maybe it was the heat Maybe it was other peoples labor day weekend photos. Maybe it was being in our once-green-lush-backyard now a dirt patch thanks to a summer of painters and fence boards living on it.

It was all of it. And more. Now it’s all but done. Just need a gate to keep the critters in. And here’s a photo dump so I can feel like I complained to someone and get all these photos off my phone. Thanks for listening.