Anyone here built your own fence before?

Sorry my fence building skills ended at Lincoln Logs. But HomeDepot has classes on fencebuilding if that helps.

 

I replaced a 12 foot sectin of a fence before. The biggest pain was digging the holes for the posts. The rest was actually tolerable.

 

I helped my neighbor put up the one that goes between our houses, the tricky part is ensuring that everything lines up right. It is real easy to be off when measuring everything digging the holes in the right spot. Putting it together was easy(relatively)

You can rent a hole digger and a nail gun, that takes alot of the hard work out of the job. The rest of it is just making sure everything is measured and lined up right.

Good luck.

 

I helped my dad surround 3/4 an acre with a wire fence before.

I can't imagine the wood would be that much more difficult. 6 feet sounds about right to me.

btw, if you're planning to get dogs, you might want to think about burying a little bit of chain link, chicken wire, or whatever around the fence. After we did that our dogs never thought about digging out ever again.

 

I checked my Home Depot "Outdoor Projects" book, and they recommend spacing posts either 6 or 8 feet apart. Our fence (Eight-foot-high wooden privacy) has the posts spaced every eight feet. Since the previous owner put it up, I think the fence is at least nine years old and there is a slight bit of sagging between the posts. But otherwise, it's held up well.

I would imagine the tighter six-foot spacing of the posts would cut down on sagging. FYI, the Home Depot book also recommends renting a power auger for digging the post holes.

 

we built a fence like that once. It wasn't that long though. Couldn't have been but 20 feet or so. Ours turned out to be about 9 feet tall, but you couldn't bust through it with a freight train. Whenever we'd do projects at home, my father would always do something about 50 times more than it needed to be done. When we painted the house it got six coats of latex paint.

We were replacing a fence that was falling apart, and the dog from the neighbor's yard would dig under. So we replaced the posts, set them in cement, then dug a 1.5 foot trench and set a large board down there so that nothing could get under. The fence is then built sitting in front of that board. There are the horizontal crosspieces in between the posts, then one diagonal crosspiece. Then we used individual slats. The slats aren't individually next to eachother exactly. The overlap and underlap. like this:

slat slat slat slat
slat slat slat

Frankly, if I were building this again, I wouldn't have done nearly this much. I'm not joking when I say the wall of my office is not as strong as that fence. Oh, and we didn't nail anything, we used wood screws, so that it could theoretically be taken apart if needed. Screws are also quite a bit stronger in holding the wood together than simple nails.

One thing I would DEFINITELY do is make sure to use treated lumber. I think I'd also use screws because they were pretty easy.

 

Years ago my cousin got a bunch of friends and I to help put up his "wooden privacy fence", or whatever you call it, and promised all the beer we could drink. Well, it didn't turn out very straight... and neither were we. If you have some friends help you, you might keep this in mind!

 

I would definately go with Lowes. I mean, Gene Hackman does their commercials, you can't go wrong with Hackman.

 

If you have a fence up now and wanted to replace it {from chain to wood}, would you simply use the holes that were previously dug? If so, how would you get the cement out??