New Fence (Sort of)

Mr. Miyagi would have been proud of the way I painted the fence. (No car waxing for me, though, luckily.) Our fence is most likely what came originally with the house when it was built 17 years ago, and it was looking pretty bad. Buying a new fence would cost probably $3,000 - $5,000 for our large back yard, so we decided -- rather naively -- to go ahead and clean and stain it ourselves. Little did we know that it would take roughly 60 man hours to finish the job. (That's still better than paying thousands of dollar, but sacrificing many weekends just to complete the job made me appreciate why it costs to much to get a new one!)

Ryan spent 16 hours one weekend just powerwashing the fence. (Unfortunately, he rented the power washer from Home Depot and it broke twice on him, so part of his weekend was spent scurrying back and forth from the HD to get a new one.) He spent another weekend in nearly 100 degree heat staining. He decided at that pace it would take him much too long to complete the task alone, so luckily his mom was nice enough to come down the following weekend to watch Lilly while the two of us spent 16 more hours finishing up the job. Whew!

I have to say, though, the new fence look bea-u-ti-ful! I love the new color! You can't see it from the picture, but it matches the brick of our house perfectly. Hopefully the new stain will protect the fence for another 8 years or so.

Before (Non-powerwashed and post-powerwashed)


In Progress

After