The Fence: Lessons Learned

When you work on a project that torments you, you learn a lot. You hate it all along the way, but at least you learn something. I guess.

Here are the 5 most important things we learned:

1. Have a good plan

It took us a little while to get there, but once we had the plan (and drew up a lot of details) it made laying things out a lot easier. Sure, we messed up on all the measurements along the way, but it was nice to at least have a reference :)

2. Measure 17 times, cut once

(you've seen this scratched out page of notes quite a few times now...)

I cannot stress this enough. I know they say measure TWICE, cut once. But we weren't that lucky. We measured once, twice, three times, sometimes FIVE and had to make more than one cut quite a few times. I don't know what was going on in the three of our brains, but apparently we were vegetables during those two days. Always at least double check your work.

3. When you have a crap ton of fence to build and it's made up of a crap ton of wood, get your supplies delivered

Originally we weren't going to have things delivered. But we spent 2 hours driving around to HD and a lumber yard getting about 1/5 of what we needed to build the fence before we threw in the towel. We called up the lumber yard and they only charged $48 (! score !) for delivery. It was well worth the DAY we probably would have spent shuttling back and forth between HD, the lumber yard and my parent's house buying the 25 bags of concrete we needed and allllllll that wood.

4. Augers aren't all they're cracked up to be. They're CERTAINLY helpful, but they require a lot more work than anyone anticipated

First there's the whole "you have to be the height of a regular person to really get a handle on the sucker" deal you're up against. THEN, drilling a 12" hole is a bit harder than we thought. Our 8" pilot holes certainly came in handy, but it didn't really save much time, it just saved headache and back aches (which believe me, is much appreciated as well). I remember watching an episode of Renovation Realities when a couple used an auger to build their deck and made it look easy (and that's on Renovation Realities which of course LOVES to showcase all of our horrible failings in home building). I had the grand idea that the auger would go into the ground like butta'. Not the case. At all. Maybe we've got super hard soil, or we just really sucked, or maybe our auger sucked, but using that thing wasn't as easy, fun, or as fast as we thought it was going to be.

and the most important

5. Sometimes you gotta suck it up when you suck bad

We made so many mistakes and took so long with this project. I'm glad that my parents are so understanding and helped so much along the way. I was amazed at how much we struggled at each step. Not that I think we're amazing, but we've built a fence before and we've been working on our house for over 2 years now so you wouldn't think something as easy as MEASURING would cause so many problems. But hey, it did. We fucked up, we fixed things, we laughed, we cried (or at least I did), we kicked fence boards (again, just me), and we yelled at each other. It was one of the more difficult projects we've worked on and we really struggled each step of the way. But you know what, now it's funny. It took a little while to get to the funny place, but we're there now. We laugh with my dad when we think how many times we had to measure and wonder how upbeat Wendy always was despite the fact that her fence looked like it belonged in a circus at one point (it was literally four different colors).

I'm glad the project is done. But I'm also glad that we learned so much. Now I know a lot of things not to do, but I also know that sometimes things do not go according to any plan you've made, but in the end it might still be built well and look great...


...despite all the blood sweat and tears involved. Although strangely, I don't think any blood was involved. I guess that's the ONE thing we didn't mess up on.