Adding a split rail fence has always been on the landscaping to do list. There are a few houses in our neighborhood with this rustic fence style and after passing them daily, the desire for our own finally got the best of me =)
When we started, it looked like this:
Pretty plain, right? That is partly why we chose this house. It was basically a blank canvas, without much (good or bad) added to it over the 60 years it has been around.
As usual, I had help from my father-in-law with equipment and design (largely to ease my wife’s fear I would somehow screw it up). Split rail fences are easy to install, but are designed for right-angle corners, which isn’t what I had in mind.
Here are the materials and equipment that we used:
- 16 5ft. posts (2 end posts)
- 32 8ft. split rails (1 extra just in case and 1 used for the new mail box)
- Post holer
- 18 bags of fence post cement
- Sawzall – Indispensable in all these projects really…
- Smaller hand saw to clean out the holes in the post
- 4 ft level
- 3 inch wood scews
Here is an in-progress shot:
This was shot after we finished digging all of the post holes. (You will likely notice that there is no longer any grass, but that is another post entirely.) We had to dig down about 2 feet to be within the city’s 3-foot height requirement. You may also notice the tree roots, these made digging a couple of the holes a pretty major, and time consuming, pain.
After about 6 hours here is what it looked like:
We added the new mail box post last minute, and it turned out better than expected! All in all, I think the project was a success. On the 1-10 scale for how hard this would be to do it yourself, with 1 being “so easy your grandmother could do it” and 10 being “hire some one else” - I would put it at a 3. The hardest part was digging the holes and working around the tree roots.
