New fence to save my dogs... and neighbors.

About a year ago a part of the fence in my back yard was falling down from some of the posts being rotted out. Around the same time my wife and I decided that since our kids were older and no longer played on the play set we had, we decided to give it away to make room for some additional garden beds.  We posted an ad on Craigslist for someone to come pick it up for free.  Since the fence was falling down anyway and we were getting rid of the play set, I decided to take the fence down to make it easy for someone to put the play set on a truck or trailer and haul it away.I knew I would eventually have to rebuild the fence but kept putting it off.

A few weeks ago I witnessed my dogs run from our backyard, across the street, and try to attack a 5 year old little boy, Logan, for no reason.  I have no issue with dogs protecting their domain (house, yard, kids, etc) but this was not a protection posture. In speaking with his dad, my neighbor John - he indicated that the dogs had attacked him previously and he had to hit the dogs to get them to back off.

I apologized profusely and made a decision that two things needed to be done.

1. I need to rebuild the fence.
2. I need to get the dogs trained to not randomly attack people.

The fence was the immediate need so that Friday evening after work I ran to Lowes to purchase what I thought I needed.  Let me start off by saying that while the rest of my family is very good with their hands - I am a geek and have never really done anything construction related.  So building a fence for me was intimidating.  I'm sure my brother and cousins will be making fun of me (if they see this) because this kind of thing is nothing to them but to me this was uncharted territory.

So I created a list because well that's how geeks who are organized work.

3 - 8 ft Pressure Treated 4x4's (posts)
2 - 50 lb bags of Qickreet
7 - 8 ft Pressure Treated 2 x 4's (rails)
20 - fence pickets (pickets)
50 - 3 1/2" Deck Screws
125 - 2" Deck Screws
Post Level

I get to Lowes and I see a cart that has almost all of this stuff on it and I'm thinking, someone else is building a fence too.  I start running down the aisles inventorying where everything is and adding aisle numbers and prices to my list so I can evaluate how much this is going to cost and grab everything in one shot.  I'm having trouble finding the pickets but I know I saw them on that other cart so they have to be here.  I notice that the cart I saw earlier is still sitting there, at least 30 mins later.  I ask an attendant if that is someone's cart?  He says no those are returns and I can help myself to it.  I grab the cart, take a few things off that I don't need, grab the couple things I did need and was out 10 mins later.  Awesome!

I woke up Saturday morning and started laying things out.  Below is the before picture from three different angles.  You can see I was laying out the posts to envision how it was going to go together and ensure I had enough materials.

After measuring everything out I realized that I needed about 30 more pickets and a couple more rails. So I headed back to Lowes for the additional stuff and got started.

This picture shows the feeble wire fence I put up to keep the dogs in.  This was an epic failure.

I dug the first hole, put the post in and poured quickreet in the hole then poured some water in the hole and used a stick to mix it up.  Then I used some old 2 x 4's that I had to stabilize the post in place after leveling with the post level.

Same for the second post.

Here, I had my daughter take a pic with me in it. Was a long day but I was glad to get this process started.  Believe it or not I had actually lost about 35 lbs over the past few years, it's hard to tell in this pic. :(

The next day (Sunday) it snowed like crazy so I got nothing done.  I left the posts in the ground and stabilized and hoped for better weather on Monday (I was off work for MLK day).

Monday was cold, about 20 degrees, but workable, you can see the snow on the ground still.  All three posts are in and stabilized - the quickreet is solid so I begin the process of removing the stabilizers and building the fence.

The first rails are on - I didn't do a great job of placing the posts the proper distance from each other so I had to offset the second rail lower than the other two.  I don't see it as a big deal but pros will probably call it a rookie mistake (I can accept that).

All three of the rails on before lunch and it's starting to look like a fence.

Here is a close up of how I had to put the rails on.  I didn't think cutting a few inches off the rail so they would fit side by side was worth the hassle, the offset seemed to be a better solution.  Time will tell.

Starting to put the picket on.  I cut each board to length to ensure the top of the fence was the same height and to account for the varying ground level.

So I was 5 pickets short...  being a geek it was very frustrating to realize that I had miscalculated and was not be able to finish the job.  However, I think the fence looks great and the wife loved it (that's the most important part).  You can see the outdoor rabbit cage on the right side of this picture below that I placed in that corner to ensure the dogs couldn't get out for a few days until I could get 5 more pickets.

About a week later and I got the 5 pickets up.  The fence is done and it looks great.

All in all it was a great experience that really built my confidence in these types of projects.  I need to do them more often so I can improve my skill set and get some more things done.

Now I need to get to training those dogs better.

Thanks,
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