The materials and tools, including circular power saw !!!, and power drill driver !!!, boards, nails, stain, and so on, for the rest of the fence work cost about $150, more or less. I knew I would have to cut the fence panels to fit the terrain, so I bought a circular saw, which I had never used before. My across-the-street neighbor is handy with tools, so I brought my new saw over and asked him how to turn it on. His eyes got very big. Just a few weeks ago, I had rushed out of my house bleeding profusely from a mandoline cut, so I'm sure he thought I was the last person who should be trusted alone with power tools, but he kindly offered to not just show me how to turn on the saw, but how to safely, safely, safely use the saw.
I successfully cut and attached all the missing panels, then I stained the entire fence. I had to use an opaque stain because there were so many different colors of fence boards: new boards, old boards, cedar boards, redwood boards. My privacy solution was to add a wire trellis and topper to the fence to train vines a couple of feet higher than the 5-6 foot boards. I got the idea from a Martha Stewart web page, but her "invisible trellis" design did not include a topper. The wire trellis consists of eyehook screws placed in a pattern -- I did a repeating pattern every 8 boards or so of a fan up to about 4-1/2 feet then a criss-cross rectangle for another 2-1/2 feet. The screws attach to the fence panels and the posts every 8 boards or so; the wires run through the eyehooks. I added posts (7-ft high, 1x2s, every 8 panels or so) to Martha Stewart's idea, to take the fence higher, and for stability. That's where I used the drill driver, because the screws had to be long enough to go through the 1x2s, then through the 1x4 panels, and into the frame posts inside.
This picture was taken a little later, after I started the vines. (Is that a Charleston bench I see sitting in front of The Back 40 (Inches)?)
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