We don’t usually do a huge amount of work on Saturdays, but with the way things are at the minute with Covid and it’s restrictions, and with many predictions of how tough things to come could be, we are taking every bit of work that we can manage. So we looked at this job a few weeks back and the client was very specific with what they wanted. We have done a similar fence to this in the past out of hardwood, and it was very time consuming as we had to pre-drill and screw every fixing. This one however was going to be out of treated softwood, so we could use nails to fix to the posts, saving a lot of time. However, it was still very tricky to predict just how long it would take to construct. We gave ourselves 1 day to complete the dance along with a few other small jobs to “dog-proof” the garden. The house was 1 of roughly 10 new build adjoined cottages, with only 2 currently being lived in due to just how freshly built they are. As usual, the garden was nothing but subsoil, and mess spread over the entire plot. Oddly, as we dug the holes for the fence, we found the that first 12” or so was awful soil, but then found some very nice under that. The builders made no attempt to bury the spoil they dug out, or to try and save the decent soil that was there to begin with. This is one of many problems we counter when working on brand new properties. Most modern large building companies (not all) now do things as quickly and as cheaply as possible, which also means to the minimum requirements needed for current building regulations.
This fence is very easy to construct. The first job is to concrete the post in, using a string line to keep them nice and straight. Our facing timbers were 3.6 meters long , so we kept our posts at 1.8 meters apart. This gave us a post at either end, and a support post in the middle. Not only that, it gave us the option to attach the facing timbers in a brickwork pattern, which stopped us having all of the timbers joining together on the same post. We used 38mm X 25mm and 75mm X 25mm timbers, and used the sizes alternately as we went up.
We had 2 boundary fences to build. The 1st was only 2 lengths long, and the ground was relatively level. This one was nice and easy to build, and we had it all done by before midday.
The second wasn’t so easy. It was built on quite a steep section of the garden, not only that, the gradient was far from constant, so we decided to put 2 steps in the fence to cater for these issues.
We managed to get a string of small dog-proofing jobs, and both fences done before 5pm. On the whole, not a bad days work.
Any questions about this, or any other aspect of landscape gardening, feel free to ask.
Thank you for the interest.
How are boards typically identified in the metric world? Here, a 2x4 is nominally 2"x4" (approx. 5cm x 10cm), but that's the rough-sawn lumber. The boards are milled down 1/4" (+/- 6mm) for a finished size of 1.5" x 3.5". Is metric lumber similar, or is the actual finished size used?
Depends on what you buy. Most sawn timbers are pretty good. The 4”x2” equivalents are 100mm X 50mm. If you buy the planed equivalent it’s 95mm x 45mm. It gets complicated when buying things like ply boards. They are still in imperial measurements. 8’ X 4’ Or sometimes sold as 2440mm X 1220mm. You could imagine what it would have been like replacing any type of board in a building, to find the metric version won’t fit onto the joists, as they would have been slightly smaller.
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