DIY Privacy Fence How to build a Fence 150 Feet 6 Shadow Box Fence Makeover Pt. 1

Alright, welcome back. I just finished about 150 feet of my fencing project. This is a 6 foot high privacy fence. It's a shadowbox style fence because I'm connecting it into a fence that I already have, which is a shadowbox style fence. I had never built anything like this before and this was a really fun learning process for me. So I just wanted to share what I did, how I did it, and hopefully I can help you not make some of the same mistakes I did and show you what I did. So I hope you stick around. Alright, so before we get into this too far, I want to give you a quick preview of what's going on here. You can see that I've connected into my old fence and I'm continuing with that same theme, that shadowbox style fence. I'm moving it roughly about 18 feet closer to the road and I'm building the new sections before I take down the old. This is going to allow me to keep the dogs contained a little bit better for a little bit longer period of time. And then you can see as we get to the back here, we're not only going 18 feet closer to the road, but we're going to go about 45 feet further back, giving us a whole lot more space in this yard. As always, I try to make the most detailed plans that I can. For me, I love 3D modeling, so that's where I chose to do this. This is my CAD drawing based on models from the previous fence that's already there. Then once I had this plan, I went outside and started marking off the locations for the fence. Make sure you take detailed measurements and make sure you know exactly where you're going to put this. You have your building permits in place, and you know that you're on your own property. I placed rebarb into the ground front and back where I wanted this, and then I made sure to use a string so that I could get a nice straight line in between those points. The next major step in the project was to dig all the post holes, and to do this I rented a mini skid steer with the auger attachment from a local rental place. This ended up being an amazing decision, because I had 45 holes to dig in total for the entire project. We were easily able to do this in a single day. I did probably about 20 of them in an hour and a half, and then the other 20 that you'll see in another video, because they're up on top of the hill, took a little bit longer because there was some kind of weird maneuvering, but this thing was super strong. I went down about 36 inches all the way down, and could have went even a little bit deeper, probably around 42 inches if I really wanted to bottom this thing out. The rental also included the bucket with the mini skid steer, so it made cleaning up all the dirt that comes out of the holes super easy as well. The only problem we had when using the auger was on three of these four holes. So one of those is just a test hole, but we hit something really hard when we were doing these three holes, and we only got about 12 inches down before it couldn't go any further and we didn't want to ruin anything. It's solid asphalt and concrete down there. So I went back to the rental place, and I got one of these brute jackhammers. And jackhammers aren't the most fun thing to use in the world, but I rented this thing for about four hours, and it took about three and a half hours to go down 12 to 16 inches, depending on the hole, to get through the concrete and asphalt. Once I made it through all the concrete and asphalt, I then manually, using a post hole digger, continued down, and since these were key holes on one side of the gate, I had to make sure that these were deep enough. 12 inches wasn't going to work. I ended up getting down to about 48 inches on the one that's closest to the gate, and then the one that's also the support post. Then the next step was installing the posts. And to do this, I first started off by putting in the front corner and the rear corner posts. Those are your two most important ones. Midway up the post, I tied a string and ran it from post to post so that I could install all of these in a straight line. Alright, at this point, I'm down to the last two posts for the new sections of fence, and I just wanted to take a little bit of time to show you how I actually put the posts in the ground. Not that it's a crazy, complicated scenario here, but once I started doing a little bit of research on what is the best way to do this, I found out that online, there's a hundred different ways to do it, and everybody thinks they have the correct method. I don't know if this is exactly the correct method or not, but this is the method that The first thing that I like to do is remove all the loose dirt that's left behind from the auger. And for me, it's rained since I did all these post holes, so there's a bunch of muck down at the bottom of the hole. And another thing that I like to do is try to bell out the bottom of the hole, or make the bottom of the hole a little bit wider, so that when you pour the concrete in there, it'll actually kind of be wider than the actual hole itself and help resist pulling up. The next thing that I do is check the depth of the hole to make sure that it's the proper depth. In my area, the frost line's 32 inches deep, so I made all of my holes at least 36 inches deep. And the holes that are on either side of a gate, I went down as far as 48 inches deep. The next thing that I do is add a little bit of dry concrete to the bottom of the hole. When you're doing this, you should probably be wearing a respirator. You can see that I'm just trying to stay upwind of this. This is kind of hazardous. But I pour about an inch and a half to two inches of dry concrete on the bottom, and then I pack it down with the post. And the theory behind this is that over time, groundwater is going to cure that concrete and make a super hard bottom that's going to seal in the bottom of the post. Next it's time to get the post level. And I like to use one of these post levels so that you can see if it's plumb in two different directions. And ideally, I'm trying to get the post to just barely touch that string line that we had earlier. Since I'm working by myself, I'm going to add these two little support braces, screw those on. I will check the post level with a four-foot level just to make sure that it's 100% plumb. You can see that I push these down into the ground so that the post doesn't move too much, and then eventually I pound in two pieces of wood and screw those to it so that those things aren't going anywhere. All right, then when it came time to start mixing concrete, I just did it in an old wheelbarrow. You can see that I'm using Quickrete's standard high-strength concrete, and I'm using 80-pound bags. What I found was that a 9-inch diameter hole, about 36 inches deep with a post in it, took about two and a half bags of concrete, and that's 80-pound bags. That's the main reason that I use their standard high-strength concrete. They make quick-setting concrete for fence post holes, which is really nice. You just pour the concrete in, in the bag, dry into the hole, and then you spray water into it, and it's a much easier process. But those are a dollar more per bag for a 30-pound less bag. So I was willing to sacrifice a little bit of effort in the way to save a little bit of money. So you can see I go ahead and pour that concrete in, try to make sure that I get most of it in the hole. Then I use a piece of rebarb to try to pack down that concrete and get rid of any air pockets or air bubbles that we have. Then I come back with even a board just to further try to pack that concrete down in there to make sure that it's down in the hole really well, and that I've gotten it on all sides of the post hole. Yet again, keep pouring more concrete in there. This is a pretty deep hole that we're looking at here. This one's 48 inches deep, so you can see that's three bags, three 80-pound bags of concrete, and just a little bit more. Once all the concrete's in there, I try to mound up the concrete on each side of the post about an inch and a half or so, and trowel it roughly smooth so that it is sloping away from the post, keeping any water from getting up on that post and rotting. So we're trying to keep the water rolling away from the post. Then once all the posts are installed, we need to cut them to their actual height. The way that I did this was I measured up 68 inches on the front corner post and also 68 inches on the rear corner post, and I ran a string that was super, super tight so that it wouldn't sag from post to post. What this is going to enable me to do is cut all of these posts off in a pretty much straight line. I have a uniform slope from the front all the way to the back, so I'll cut all these posts off in a straight line. You can see here that I'm marking down an inch and a half, which is the distance from the edge of my circular saw to the blade, and then I'm going to clamp my speed square to the post, and that's going to be kind of a ledge for my circular saw to sit on when I'm cutting off this post. Then the next step was to install the stringers, and honestly this went really easy because I already had the post cut to the exact height that I needed. So I started off with the top stringer, and you can see since I'm working by myself, I have a clamp on the far post to hold the top stringer up for me. Then all I have to do is put in a screw to kind of temporarily hold it, and then I can go put a screw on the other side. For these, I'm using three and a half inch deck screws, two on each side, so this thing's going to be pretty strong. Then I have a spacer that I use, mine's 22 and a quarter inches, and then I have a piece of two by four the thickness of one of the stringers, and I'm putting in a clamp down below here to help me hold it. Then I install this stringer the same way, yet again with those three and a half inch decking screws, two on each side, and then I do the same exact process for the bottom stringer. The last step is to use the circular saw. I set the depth just over an inch and a half, and halfway across the post, I cut off the excess material so that the next stringer can catch part of the post. All right, so now it really starts looking like a fence. It's time to install the pickets. I always like to start from the inside, and I start by installing the far picket that's touching the inside of the post. You can see I'm using a jig here so that it comes out the exact height that I need, and that height is six inches above the top stringer. I just tack it in real quick, and then I move to the other side and repeat the same process. You can see that now I have a jig going straight over top of all of them so that all the pickets are the same height. Next I take a quick measurement in between the two pickets, just to make sure that my spacing's correct, since it can vary from section to section. Then using a pre-cut spacer block, I just hold that with the air nailer, make sure that the picket lines up with that and the top board that I have in place to keep all the pickets straight, and then I use a four-foot level to make sure that that picket is plumb, and tack it in. One thing that I do want to point out is that I am paying attention to the grain on the boards as I'm installing them. I like to say that I put the cup in, but you can see the grain that I have there and the way that it relates to the stringer that it's leaning on. That's the direction that I install it in, and I do this so if the board does warp or dry out, or when it is drying out and it does tend to warp a little bit, the nails will hold it in, and if it does warp, it'll be less visible. Then I repeat this process using that spacer board, tacking them in, make sure each one of them's level, and this does a really nice job of getting all these boards in line. For this, I'm using a coil siding nailer, and the nails that I'm using are a full round ring shank nail. They are hot-dipped galvanized nails, and you definitely want to make sure that you pay attention that you're using the correct fasteners for the wood that you're using. Different woods require different fasteners because of corrosion and stuff like that, so these are pressure-treated pine boards, and galvanized nails were recommended. Then when it came to putting on the outside pickets, I made sure that I put on the far picket first to make sure that it was covering the post. I put up my top jig so that all of my pickets would be right in the row. Then I go to this middle section of the fence, and I work my way out, and really the big thing that I learned from this was to not worry so much about the spacing, just to make sure that they equally cover the board from the inside, so it overlaps the board on the inside equally. The last pickets to go up were the ones that were on the front of my fence that I blended in to my pre-existing section of fence. For these, I actually had to buy some 8-foot pickets and cut them down because they extended a little bit further. You can see that we put in an extra board to help go a little bit lower so that there wasn't so much that was unsupported, but this ended up going really well. The only additional thing that I need to do is to cut off the bottoms of these pickets, and I'm not going to do that until later because there's going to be kind of a mulch bed area, and my landscaping underneath it will change. Alright, so part number one of my fence rebuilding, moving, extending project that I have going on here is just about done. About 150 feet of new fence was just built, like you guys saw, and I'm pretty pleased with it. It definitely didn't go as I thought it would have for many different reasons, but the main reason was I thought I had a CAD drawing all done, precise measurements, I thought all my spacing was going to work out perfectly and everything was going to be awesome, but I soon found out when I was using the auger, sometimes the holes didn't get drilled exactly where I wanted to, or you hit something down there like a bunch of asphalt and concrete, and they move the auger around, you have to adjust the post. When you're putting them in, maybe you were an inch off one direction or the other. The thing that I really didn't account for was the picket size being different. Some of them were 5-1-1, some of them were 5-3-1, some of them were 5-5-8, so they were all different sizes and trying to get that spacing correct was giving me a hard time. I think the major reason for that being is the way that I built my shadowbox fence. Some people just pick a standard spacing and they have a size and they just go boom all the way through and they don't care where their boards ended up. I tried to mimic the fence that I already had because I liked the professional look of it. They always have a board on the outside of the fence covering the post, so from the outside you can't see any of the post at all, and then from the inside you always have a board budding up on either side of the post and it looks really nice. I've seen some fences where they just take a spacing and just go with it, and then you get some weird boards or you don't get the post covered, and I really didn't want that. One of the biggest surprises for this project was how much lumber went up from when I originally estimated this to when I actually bought all the material. This 150 feet of fence was probably close to $1,000 more now than it was before, and I'm not complaining. I was going to build a fence and I needed it and it is what it is, but just something else that was going on with this one. One good surprise about this project was how good the air nailer was that I bought. I bought a Pierce air nailer. It's a coil siding nailer from Harbor Freight. Sometimes I like to invest in really nice tools. I really try to invest in nice tools, but I didn't think I was going to be using this one all this often, so I bought a $200 siding nailer. To be honest with you, the price of the nailer and the nails was almost equal to screws if I was going to screw every one of these pickets in, so it was kind of a toss up. Take the chance on a nailer and have a nailer hopefully when you are done, or spend all the money on screws. I am so glad that I bought this nailer. One thing that I did a little bit differently from the fence that I was mimicking, the fence that I already have, was the board spacing. On my fence currently, the spacing is anywhere from 3.5 inches to 4 inches, so there is a decent amount of space in between the boards. With the fence that I just made, the spacing is anywhere from 2.75 to just over 3. So the boards are a whole lot closer together. The sections are a little bit smaller, so instead of full 8 foot sections, I shrunk them down to 74 inch on center sections and got a little closer spacing than in the previous fence design. Me living on a decently busy road, I wanted that extra privacy. So the more that those boards are overlapped, the more of an angle that you have to get on to look through the fence. I really like the shadow box design because it is not just one big solid wall. It has some kind of texture to it, or some positive and negative space I guess you could say. You can also see through it a little bit, but it offers a ton of privacy. From our standpoint, it's amazing because it's almost up on a hill. It's about 2.5 to 3 feet higher than my other fence. So it's really cool on how much more privacy that we have. This is just step number one to this project. The new fence has been built. In another video, I need to make the gates. So I have a gate opening in the back back there that you saw. It was supposed to be right over 12 feet. It's probably closer to 13 feet where I had to actually put the post. So I'm going to need to make a really big double gate for that, which is going to be like I said in another video. Then I'm going to be moving a bunch of these existing fence panels to the back of my yard and to the other side to try to reuse them to save a little bit of money. I have a feeling that that's going to be way more difficult than actually building new fence, but I'm going to try to do it just to save a little bit of money. And these older fence panels, they're still in decent condition, but they're just going to be in the way back of the yard behind a bunch of trees and on a hill. So it shouldn't really be that noticeable. Another thing that I'm going to do is wait to stain this fence. I'm going to wait about a month or two while I'm getting the rest of this fence project taken care of and I'm going to do some other projects definitely that I'm going to make videos about and you'll see. But I'm going to wait and let the fence kind of weather and dry out. It's crazy how wet some of the boards were that were from the center of the pallet and some of the fence panels that have been up for about a day or two longer than the ones that I just finished, you can already see that the boards feel like they're drying out. And when they're drying out, they're going to shrink. If I rush into staining this, I think I'm going to have to go back and do a bunch of touch ups because of all the areas that are going to shrink and that were covered that aren't going to be covered now. The other thing about this project is it is going to be a pain in the butt to stain this thing. And I'll bring you along for the journey so that you can see how miserable it is for me. If you have any good ideas on what would possibly make this easier, definitely a paint sprayer is going to be involved in some way, shape or form, but because of how close these boards are together and how much overlap I have, it's definitely going to be a little bit interesting how this goes. If you enjoyed the process or enjoyed the video, please give it a thumbs up. If you are interested to see how these gates come out, how big of a struggle it is to move these other fence panels and get it to actually look decent, I really encourage you guys to subscribe so you don't miss anything. But other than that, I hope you guys come back for another video.