The Fence Project: A Reflection
Wow, where do I start? The fence project is the biggest project that I have taken on in my recent memory. Unfortunately, it also highlighted my weakness of severely under-estimating the amount of time that it takes to get these kinds of things done, like thinking I could put up all the rails in one day instead of the actual week that it took. But before jumping into all of the details, maybe I should start at the beginning.
The fence project was an idea that started before Andrew was born. Ashlynn was getting old enough to walk around and explore, and she got her first few spankings from walking out into the road instead of staying in the yard. Meanwhile, Megan and I started throwing around ideas of what we wanted to budget for, including house projects, dream vacations, and musical instruments. After Andrew was born and we had spent a summer at home with him, we both agreed to put a fence around the yard so that the kids could go play outside without having to worry about them getting lost or run over.
At first, we wanted to put the fence in the backyard where we had the garden. It was a bigger space and seemed like a better spot to build a fence. After measuring it out and doing an initial search for how much it might cost, we sat on the idea for a couple of months. Eventually, I started thinking that the backyard might not be the best place for a fence - the main reasons were that there weren't many windows on that side of the house to watch the kids and that there was no door to send them out into the backyard without having to go around the side of the house. Plus, it was a pretty large area to fence in and it was going to be expensive.
So I started looking at the front yard and planned to build a fence along the driveway and the road, leaving space for Megan's parents to park their camper when they come to visit (in a month!). This process started as soon as the snow had melted this spring. Megan and I walked out the perimeter several times, trying to decide exactly where the fence ought to go. After a few weeks of this, I made a final decision and measured out the length: 125 feet with two gates. Megan and I had also been discussing what type of fence we liked, and we decided on a wooden picket fence.
We rode around the neighborhood looking for some ideas on what a good picket fence looked like, and then I went to the drawing board to try and get some exact dimensions figured out so I could plan for how much lumber we needed to buy. My drawing board is an old hobby of mine called World Hammer, which is actually a map-making program for first-person shooter games like Half-Life, but it allows me to render 3-D objects with exact dimensions pretty efficiently. It only took me a couple of hours to finish the initial drawing and then estimate the amount of lumber needed.
After that, I made some wooden stakes to get a more exact measurement of where the fence posts would go and drove them into the ground at 8-foot intervals. Driving in the stakes was exciting because it felt like I was actually making some physical progress on the fence, turning an idea into something real. I drew up a sketch and filled out the paperwork for the city in the middle of May and they approved it in the beginning of June. Now this summer has been really crazy (I'm going to write a journal entry on this summer next week) so I only had about 4 days of actually being at home during the month of June. I wasn't able to start breaking ground until after our Denver trip over the 4th of July.
I must have dug the first hole on July 11th, because I went to rent a gas-powered post auger on the 12th. The first hole was incredibly hard. I had no clue what I was doing. The post hole digger that I had bought for the project certainly didn't work. It wouldn't cut through the soil, and then everything would break apart and it couldn't pick any of it up. Plus, right away I started hitting small tree roots and I would have to switch tools to try and break them before going any further. I tried for about two hours and only got the first hole half-way finished. The funny thing is that I had planned to dig all of the holes in a day or two, and this first hole was setting the pace for about 40 hours worth of work.
I rented the post auger from Strobel's early Thursday morning and was excited to get the rest of the job finished before the end of the day. When I unpacked it and started drilling, it turned out that the soil was too hard for even this! The auger would go about 4 inches down and then just start spinning on the hard clay, even when I put all of my weight into it. I tried using the hose to pour water into the hole and then auger it out, and it kind of worked but it made a huge mess out of everything. Next, I used the 16 pound tamping bar to try and loosen up the soil, replace the auger, and drill another few inches. The dirt wasn't coming out over the top of the hole, just loosening in the bottom, so I had to put the auger down, get on my hands and knees, and pull the loose dirt out with my hands every few inches. It took about an hour and a half to dig the second hole, and I wasn't sure what to do because I really didn't want to spend the whole week digging holes and I was already behind schedule.
Well, I tried various combinations of water, hands, shovel, post hole digger, gas-powered auger, and tamping bar on the next couple of holes, and unfortunately, found out that the quickest way to dig a hole in my hard clay soil was to use a shovel to break the first 5-6 inches, then to use the tamping bar to break up the next 2-3 inches followed by using my hands to haul the loose dirt out (on the last 5 or 6 holes, I found that using a tin cup was faster than using my hands). After about 8 holes, I was able to dig a 2-foot deep, 1-foot diameter hole in about 20-30 minutes. I finished 11 on Thursday and the other 10 on Friday - a much harder task because of the 4 or 5 gigantic tree roots that I had to axe through with the spud bar. I went back and finalized all the holes on Sunday.
My brother Mark is a civil engineer, and I consulted him on how to set the posts. It was his recommendation to dig 2 feet deep and 1 foot wide, plus setting the posts in concrete. I calculated the volume of each hole minus the volume of the post to come up with a cubic yard of concrete. Dad helped me cut the 12-foot 4x4 fir posts using the radial arm saw at the school, and I took the truck to buy and haul a cubic yard of gravel plus all of the pickets for the fence on Tuesday the 17th. I found out that my truck could only hold a half a yard, so I had to make one trip Tuesday and then come back on Thursday for the pickets and the rest of the gravel.
I cut the pickets using a radial arm saw. Instead of measuring every individual cut, I parked my truck as a backstop and moved the saw so that it was exactly 42 inches away from the truck. It only took me an hour and a half to make 250 cuts. We painted the wood preservative on the posts and planned to set them on Friday. Mom and Dad took the kids for the weekend and Megan helped me set all of the posts, which took two days instead of one. It's funny because I had planned on Sunday the 15th to be done with setting the posts by Wednesday the 18th, but finished three days late. Good thing I wasn't being hired to do this professionally!
After a week off - I had gotten a call to be a camp counselor at Beartooth Christian Camp, where Megan used to work as summer staff when she first came to Montana - I started hanging the railings between the posts, which was very frustrating because most of my lumber had warped beyond use and I had to make another trip to Great Falls. Again, instead of taking one day, it took three or four days to finish. I also decided to start setting up the pickets after finishing each section because it made it feel like I was making more progress than just doing all the railings at once. Megan helped me with putting pickets up, so it was great on the second day to have rails and pickets going up at the same time. We finished all of the railings and most of the pickets by Saturday, August 4th.
Before putting up the first picket section, Megan had convinced me that the 2.5 inch gap between pickets that I had planned was too much. She was right, having a .75 inch gap looked much better, so we used that instead. However, this meant that we ran out of pickets before we ran out of fence, so I had to go and purchase more pickets before we were able to finish. I was able to cut them all and dog-ear them in an hour or so, and then finished up the rest of the fence on Monday morning.
To finish up, I designed the gates in detail and then started putting them together. I used a circular saw to cut the boards and measured out the frames first, then I laid the pickets on top to get a rough estimate of the actual heights and widths. I found a good spacing and height for each gate because all three were a little bit different in total width, and then finished by attaching the pickets and hanging the gates with Megan's help. We finished the first gate on Monday evening and the other two gates on Tuesday.
We were finally finished!!! Megan had bought a hammock for our anniversary, so I took a nice long nap in the front yard. Ashlynn said the gates were wonderful and the neighborhood kids came over to play in the yard that evening. Mom and Dad came up for a fence party on Wednesday (actually it was a surprise anniversary party for them), and I showed it off to Brian and Joe today.
We still have to stain the fence before we're technically finished with it, but I wanted to take a few days to relax after working so hard on this project for what seemed like the entire summer. There were times when I got really frustrated with it and even infuriated, but it eventually got done. I learned something about myself too, well two things really: 1) I am bad at estimating the amount of time something will take to complete. Maybe I am too optimistic about how efficiently I can work, or else it's just wishful thinking that it won't be as much work as it seems like. 2) When things aren't going according to plan, I lose it. Also, when I don't know the answer to a question, I lose it. So when things aren't going the way that they're supposed to and I'm supposed to know the answer to a question, I'm pretty quick to flip out. That's not a good thing! But knowing that those are my weaknesses helps me to be more aware during those situations, and being aware of the risks is the first step in overcoming the reaction. Sometimes I wished that I could just drop everything and go to my room, but resentfully I knew that I needed to keep working and stick with it or else it wouldn't ever get finished. I do wish that I had not decided to do so many things this summer, that the fence project would have been the main event, and that way I could have been more relaxed about it. But I had a lot of other school projects that have been totally ignored and lots of big trips out of state this summer, so it was just a little too much.
Overall, the fence looks pretty good, and it cost a lot less than having someone come and do it for me. Plus, I gained a lot of experience in carpentry and learned a bit more about myself. But most of all, I can look at that fence and say, "Hey, I built that."
The fence project was an idea that started before Andrew was born. Ashlynn was getting old enough to walk around and explore, and she got her first few spankings from walking out into the road instead of staying in the yard. Meanwhile, Megan and I started throwing around ideas of what we wanted to budget for, including house projects, dream vacations, and musical instruments. After Andrew was born and we had spent a summer at home with him, we both agreed to put a fence around the yard so that the kids could go play outside without having to worry about them getting lost or run over.
At first, we wanted to put the fence in the backyard where we had the garden. It was a bigger space and seemed like a better spot to build a fence. After measuring it out and doing an initial search for how much it might cost, we sat on the idea for a couple of months. Eventually, I started thinking that the backyard might not be the best place for a fence - the main reasons were that there weren't many windows on that side of the house to watch the kids and that there was no door to send them out into the backyard without having to go around the side of the house. Plus, it was a pretty large area to fence in and it was going to be expensive.
So I started looking at the front yard and planned to build a fence along the driveway and the road, leaving space for Megan's parents to park their camper when they come to visit (in a month!). This process started as soon as the snow had melted this spring. Megan and I walked out the perimeter several times, trying to decide exactly where the fence ought to go. After a few weeks of this, I made a final decision and measured out the length: 125 feet with two gates. Megan and I had also been discussing what type of fence we liked, and we decided on a wooden picket fence.
 |
| The front of the house. |
 |
| Picket rendering on World Hammer. |
We rode around the neighborhood looking for some ideas on what a good picket fence looked like, and then I went to the drawing board to try and get some exact dimensions figured out so I could plan for how much lumber we needed to buy. My drawing board is an old hobby of mine called World Hammer, which is actually a map-making program for first-person shooter games like Half-Life, but it allows me to render 3-D objects with exact dimensions pretty efficiently. It only took me a couple of hours to finish the initial drawing and then estimate the amount of lumber needed.
After that, I made some wooden stakes to get a more exact measurement of where the fence posts would go and drove them into the ground at 8-foot intervals. Driving in the stakes was exciting because it felt like I was actually making some physical progress on the fence, turning an idea into something real. I drew up a sketch and filled out the paperwork for the city in the middle of May and they approved it in the beginning of June. Now this summer has been really crazy (I'm going to write a journal entry on this summer next week) so I only had about 4 days of actually being at home during the month of June. I wasn't able to start breaking ground until after our Denver trip over the 4th of July.
I must have dug the first hole on July 11th, because I went to rent a gas-powered post auger on the 12th. The first hole was incredibly hard. I had no clue what I was doing. The post hole digger that I had bought for the project certainly didn't work. It wouldn't cut through the soil, and then everything would break apart and it couldn't pick any of it up. Plus, right away I started hitting small tree roots and I would have to switch tools to try and break them before going any further. I tried for about two hours and only got the first hole half-way finished. The funny thing is that I had planned to dig all of the holes in a day or two, and this first hole was setting the pace for about 40 hours worth of work.
I rented the post auger from Strobel's early Thursday morning and was excited to get the rest of the job finished before the end of the day. When I unpacked it and started drilling, it turned out that the soil was too hard for even this! The auger would go about 4 inches down and then just start spinning on the hard clay, even when I put all of my weight into it. I tried using the hose to pour water into the hole and then auger it out, and it kind of worked but it made a huge mess out of everything. Next, I used the 16 pound tamping bar to try and loosen up the soil, replace the auger, and drill another few inches. The dirt wasn't coming out over the top of the hole, just loosening in the bottom, so I had to put the auger down, get on my hands and knees, and pull the loose dirt out with my hands every few inches. It took about an hour and a half to dig the second hole, and I wasn't sure what to do because I really didn't want to spend the whole week digging holes and I was already behind schedule.
Well, I tried various combinations of water, hands, shovel, post hole digger, gas-powered auger, and tamping bar on the next couple of holes, and unfortunately, found out that the quickest way to dig a hole in my hard clay soil was to use a shovel to break the first 5-6 inches, then to use the tamping bar to break up the next 2-3 inches followed by using my hands to haul the loose dirt out (on the last 5 or 6 holes, I found that using a tin cup was faster than using my hands). After about 8 holes, I was able to dig a 2-foot deep, 1-foot diameter hole in about 20-30 minutes. I finished 11 on Thursday and the other 10 on Friday - a much harder task because of the 4 or 5 gigantic tree roots that I had to axe through with the spud bar. I went back and finalized all the holes on Sunday.
My brother Mark is a civil engineer, and I consulted him on how to set the posts. It was his recommendation to dig 2 feet deep and 1 foot wide, plus setting the posts in concrete. I calculated the volume of each hole minus the volume of the post to come up with a cubic yard of concrete. Dad helped me cut the 12-foot 4x4 fir posts using the radial arm saw at the school, and I took the truck to buy and haul a cubic yard of gravel plus all of the pickets for the fence on Tuesday the 17th. I found out that my truck could only hold a half a yard, so I had to make one trip Tuesday and then come back on Thursday for the pickets and the rest of the gravel.
 |
| Cutting the fence pickets. |
 |
| Mixing concrete for posts. |
I cut the pickets using a radial arm saw. Instead of measuring every individual cut, I parked my truck as a backstop and moved the saw so that it was exactly 42 inches away from the truck. It only took me an hour and a half to make 250 cuts. We painted the wood preservative on the posts and planned to set them on Friday. Mom and Dad took the kids for the weekend and Megan helped me set all of the posts, which took two days instead of one. It's funny because I had planned on Sunday the 15th to be done with setting the posts by Wednesday the 18th, but finished three days late. Good thing I wasn't being hired to do this professionally!
After a week off - I had gotten a call to be a camp counselor at Beartooth Christian Camp, where Megan used to work as summer staff when she first came to Montana - I started hanging the railings between the posts, which was very frustrating because most of my lumber had warped beyond use and I had to make another trip to Great Falls. Again, instead of taking one day, it took three or four days to finish. I also decided to start setting up the pickets after finishing each section because it made it feel like I was making more progress than just doing all the railings at once. Megan helped me with putting pickets up, so it was great on the second day to have rails and pickets going up at the same time. We finished all of the railings and most of the pickets by Saturday, August 4th.
Before putting up the first picket section, Megan had convinced me that the 2.5 inch gap between pickets that I had planned was too much. She was right, having a .75 inch gap looked much better, so we used that instead. However, this meant that we ran out of pickets before we ran out of fence, so I had to go and purchase more pickets before we were able to finish. I was able to cut them all and dog-ear them in an hour or so, and then finished up the rest of the fence on Monday morning.
 |
| Planning the gates. |
We were finally finished!!! Megan had bought a hammock for our anniversary, so I took a nice long nap in the front yard. Ashlynn said the gates were wonderful and the neighborhood kids came over to play in the yard that evening. Mom and Dad came up for a fence party on Wednesday (actually it was a surprise anniversary party for them), and I showed it off to Brian and Joe today.
We still have to stain the fence before we're technically finished with it, but I wanted to take a few days to relax after working so hard on this project for what seemed like the entire summer. There were times when I got really frustrated with it and even infuriated, but it eventually got done. I learned something about myself too, well two things really: 1) I am bad at estimating the amount of time something will take to complete. Maybe I am too optimistic about how efficiently I can work, or else it's just wishful thinking that it won't be as much work as it seems like. 2) When things aren't going according to plan, I lose it. Also, when I don't know the answer to a question, I lose it. So when things aren't going the way that they're supposed to and I'm supposed to know the answer to a question, I'm pretty quick to flip out. That's not a good thing! But knowing that those are my weaknesses helps me to be more aware during those situations, and being aware of the risks is the first step in overcoming the reaction. Sometimes I wished that I could just drop everything and go to my room, but resentfully I knew that I needed to keep working and stick with it or else it wouldn't ever get finished. I do wish that I had not decided to do so many things this summer, that the fence project would have been the main event, and that way I could have been more relaxed about it. But I had a lot of other school projects that have been totally ignored and lots of big trips out of state this summer, so it was just a little too much.
Overall, the fence looks pretty good, and it cost a lot less than having someone come and do it for me. Plus, I gained a lot of experience in carpentry and learned a bit more about myself. But most of all, I can look at that fence and say, "Hey, I built that."
 |
| The finished product. |
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