How to: Build a NEW Fence, Using OLD Scraps

Um, hi.

We’ve been a little busy over here … sorry it’s taken awhile to get this new post up, but I think y’all are gonna LOVE it for a summer project. If I had to take a stab, I would guess that 99% of homeowners don’t love their fences … and I’m gonna show you how to be part of the 1% without spending tons of money.

Okay. Here we go.



Okay, so this is what our fence WAS … you might remember me mentioning needing to replace it, when I showed you how to stain your fence for dirt cheap. Those wood posts were just a little too wobbly for our liking.



Well.

A little over a year later, the time had come. We had tons of steel fence posts left … when our HOA replaced our neighborhood’s perfectly good perimeter fence a couple years ago, Superman asked the fence company if he could have the old steel posts. They were THRILLED because it meant they didn’t have to haul them off. :D We were thrilled because they were FREE. ;)

So.

Superman tore down the entire side of the fence. This was easy – the house next door is vacant, so there wasn’t anyone to disrupt over there while we got down to business.



Superman used the same holes from the previous wooden fence posts. He stuck a steel post in each and then filled the hole with cement, making sure each post was the same height coming out of the ground and that they were perfectly straight. USE A LEVEL.

Then, he bought NEW cross beams. He put those up … and all that was left to do was just put up the pickets. He reused as many fence pickets as he could from our existing fence, but needed to replace about half of them. So. He turned to Craigslist. He found some other homeowners who also weren’t loving their fences and were replacing. He found several gently used fence panels from several places. He brought them home, stripped the pickets off, and pulled out the nails.



Um. This part is NOT fun. Like, at all. I’d rather jab dull pencils through my eyes. But. It did save us, easily, $2,000. And Superman is a patient man. So. You know. It worked out. ;)



We ended up with several scrap piles like this that later got hauled off.



Dude just picked through each fence post, took the good stuff, and dumped the junky stuff.

And then.

He got to work nailing up each picket. (he still needs to go back and put a few screws in each picket, but that’s for another day)



Something else we decided to do was flip the fence around so that we don’t have the posts on our side anymore. :D HEHEHEHE. You can do that when the house next door is vacant. Now it will be easier for Superman to mow and edge.



So, you can see how many pickets came from our old fence and how many were ‘new’ replacements.



My big contribution was to take all those fence pickets, from a ginormo messy pile, and place them up against the rails so that Superman could easily and quickly get them nailed up. I know. I rock.

When he finished constructing the new fence, it looked something like this:




So, then he whipped out some of his trusty cheaper than dirt fence stain … and got to work:



Firefighters are hawt.

Because the stain he mixed up is semi-transparent, he didn’t need to bleach the boards … it covers all the inconsistencies really well. You can’t even tell it was a ghetto rigged garbage fence, huh?



Our total cost? About $100 for the cross beams. BOOM!!



I married Superman, dude.