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Good Fences…
Categories: California House

Good fences make it easier to tolerate bad neighbors.
Our neighboring property to the West includes three houses on one lot; all are rentals. Sometimes you get good neighbors and sometimes you don’t. Two out of three isn’t bad but the third house was a home for a couple of parolees who were obnoxious on good days.

Our property is surrounded on three sides, everything but across the front yard, with a chain link fence. The west and south sides also have a privacy fence. When the privacy fence was new it was probably the maximum allowed six feet tall. Over the years the wooden posts had rotted and the entire fence had been sinking into the ground. In places it was barely five feet tall. In addition, we had to prop it up to keep major portions from falling over.

Replacing the fence is on the to-do list but we decided to repair it when we tired of having the less than savory one third of our neighbors peering into our yard. Raising the fence to its original six feet would block the view and make it that much tougher for the ex-cons to throw their beer cans into our garden.

We found some nifty brackets at Home Depot that would let us attach rails for the privacy fence directly to the posts that support the chain link. Carrie and I disassembled the old fence being careful to salvage as many of the boards as we could. We pulled up the old rotted posts and their concrete footers.

Carrie mounted all of the brackets to the fence and attached the new rails after we had sealed them.

Fencebefore.jpg

She built a jig that let her preset the nails in the salvaged boards. This kept her nail lines laser-straight and made it easier to place and nail the boards to the rails.

Fence.jpg
Fencelines.jpg

We had some fun placing the boards that have big knotholes. We lined them up as peepholes so we could look at our nasty neighbors’ front door. Our plan was to shine a flashlight through the holes at random nighttime moments to keep them nervous. The combined efforts of the Pomona Police and their landlord spoiled our fun though. The parolees were evicted before we could harass them.

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