Building a Fence Part 2

The concept of building a fence isn’t all that foreign to us. It’s something that people would talk about on tv, and in cartoons, or sometimes characters in a book will build a one to fence out their annoying neighbors or keep pesky wildlife out of their gardens or something. How many of us know what goes into building an actual fence? Where would you even start? In the last article, we went over a lot of the paperwork side of building a fence. Yes, there’s a lot of paperwork. If you were unaware go back and read part one. Unfortunately, you shouldn’t skip that part. You may want to, but you shouldn’t.

So, material, what do you want to use and how much do you need? Well, let’s start with your personal needs and preferences, or the guidelines set laid out for you by either your neighborhood or local government; whichever is applicable in this case. Why are you getting the fence, is it for privacy? For your pets? Keeping wildlife out of your goddamn vegetable garden! You need to have that in mind when you're picking out your materials. We’ll be covering your choices of materials in part three of this series.

After you know what you're going to use. It’s time do a little more physical planning before you can go out and buy anything. Meaning, planning post position. How far apart do you want the posts to be? How wide do you want them to be? How many are you going to need to actualize that vision? We do this so we don’t end up with weird to far apart gaps or a janky section at the end where you needed one more post but the spacing wasn’t quite right, so you had to saw one down. No, you can’t just eyeball and guesstimate and have the product that you wanted.

Next, it’s time to dig. You need to make sure you have the proper height for your post you’re going to need because your posts need to go pretty deep into the ground to be relatively sturdy. Up to 30 inches into the ground, yes, over 2 feet depending on the stiffness of the type of soil you have. With the posts planned, it’s time to dig. You may also need to backfill the hole with something strong to keep the posts from moving, something like gravel. Take a break after that, apparently, your posts need to settle or whatever that means.

Final steps, put up your horizontal cross rails.  The side you put them on depends on preference or government-based guidelines. I don’t know.