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April 1, 2007

putting up a picket fence

After making the rounded pickets last weekend, we were able to get a good run of the fence put together yesterday.

We again relied on the help of our skilled carpenter friend Clay. Without his presence this would've been at least much slower and probably a crooked disaster.

There were 4 main parts to yesterday's work: cutting the pickets down to size, accounting for the fence posts being out of whack, hanging the runners, and attaching the pickets. Step 2 took by far the longest amount of time, the tax of being an amateur at this stuff.

It was a fine Saturday to be out working in the neighborhood. An 11-year-old drove by on a dirtbike, totally perfect on a spring day. An old man on a bicycle was almost hit by a car and he called the driver a bitch (he was like, "oh you bitch you") and she called him a motherfucker (she was like "get yo ass out of the road you motherfucker") and he called her crackhead and it went on for a few minutes. Another neighbor was out cleaning the alley behind her house, the alley that abuts the "house of occasional drug activity", and she found a $100 bill on the ground. And the hoopty was parked too close again, hulking in the background of the day.

The tool of the day was probably string. When we were hanging the pickets, Clay did 2 things that made the process reliable and quick, which I know that we wouldn;t have known to try. The first was creating a storyboard to mark where the pickets were supposed to go. This let us mark on the runners where each picket should be, without much chance of getting it wrong or taking too very much time. The next cool thing that he did was run a string at the height of where the pickets should be. This let him place the picket in the correct spot without having to measure for each on.

Posted by john m at April 1, 2007 8:30 AM

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