Lockwood Renovation Part 3 - Fence

How to Build a Fence Without Building a Fence

If you read my last Lockwood reno post you will know that when we moved into our house it was surrounded by trees.  In fact, one of our neighbours said our house looked like a ‘ghost house’ because it was so dark and eerie!

With the trees gone to let in the light we found that we had very little privacy, so we decided we needed a new fence.  Our original fence looked like this (after a good clean!).

It was too short, and it had gaps between each of the palings.  We knew we didn’t have the budget to build an entirely new fence so, we decided to put our thinking caps on and come up with a cheaper, better solution.

This is the result.

So, what did we do?

We bought some 74mm rough sawn palings and we nailed them up over the gaps which resulted in this.

After that we needed to tackle the problem of the fence being too short.  The pavement outside our house is higher than the land our house sits on which means that everyone walking by is about the right height to look right in the windows.

We decided to add the trellis.  Of course, trellis doesn’t come in exactly the right size, so we bought larger pieces and cut them to size, then we put the edging around them.  We also added the long white upright palings which make it ‘look like’ the fence had some nice new posts.

A nice two-toned paint job and we were done.  

I make it sound soooo easy don’t I.  I can tell you it wasn’t.  Old houses (and fences) were constructed using imperial measurements and we now use the metric system.  This means that nothing translates to quite the right measurements.

Anyway, we now have a beautiful fence which is high enough and provides enough privacy for our new garden.  I’ll post about the new garden soon.

I hope you enjoyed this little bit of Kiwi ingenuity.  If you did, please leave me a comment below.