Fence Boards

So the fence is old.  Like, probably at least 20 years old.  It was old when we moved in, that was 2009.  House is white, fence is white.  Honestly, I'd rather switch to cedar and late it patina with age.  It would probably be more fitting for the hood.  Not an option, well, at least I don't have the funds to make that come to fruition.  So, I'm left with replacing only broken or rotted sections of the fence.  So the solution is easy dude, you just run down to the local home improvement shop, pickup the number of boards you need, paint them, put them up, call it good.  So easy that even a rookie, yes me, can do it.

Story begins.  This fence has that same appeal to it that a rotten piece of fruit might have.  Only instead of a fruit colored flesh, imagine a white painted flesh.  Covered with mildew from the dark, wet Pacific Northwest winter.  It's old, like I said, probably 20+ years.  There are all sorts of small cracks, holes and broken off spots on the tops and bottoms.  It's classy, like the kind of class you only get in a neighborhood with $800K+ homes, but then there is that one house that is clearly maintained by the novice, somewhat lazy homeowner.  Yeah, I live in that house.  You know, the one where I
installed new energy efficient windows in the front, added in new molding, then never painted any of it.  That was 7 years ago.  Just stop, before you start flooding me with your comments, I already know.  I spend most days of my life thinking about all these things on my list.  I know I need to do them, I am also aware how important they are.  Guess what?  I end up doing stuff like creating a new Instagram page, registering a new domain name, and creating a blog instead.  Call me stupid, cause you'd be well within your rights.

Back to it.  Oh, did I mention I live in one of the largest home owner associations in the country?  I don't have statistics, on how many homes, but I am pretty sure I read sometime a few years ago there were more than 850 homes.  I do see that there are over 8K residents.  Why wouldn't one of the more nosy individuals live just down the street from me?  You know, the type that takes a picture of their neighbors fence and sends it into the compliance manager for the HOA?  Yep, that one.  You know how that ends, with a letter in my mailbox, including said picture, of my moldy, white, decomposing, rotten, poor old fence.

We were afforded a nice opportunity this last weekend with the Memorial Day holiday (more to follow on that in a future post).  While we are normal campers, the glamping variety, we always try to avoid Memorial Day for camping trips.  Those weekends are nothing short of a hot mess bro.  So here I am, long weekend, nicer than expected weather, but still some rain sprinkles mixed in.  You nailed it, perfect weekend for some pressure washing.  The deck needs some love and more importantly, the house needs some love.  The kind of love needed after 2 summers of wild fires in the region, 2 wet winters and not enough sunshine in between.  Mildew green color and covered with a layer of smokey soot.  But the fence, yes, this story is about the fence.  That sweet little angel of my existence this week.  Yes, I pressure washed the fence.  Yeah, I know dude, you don't need to tell me.  Pressure washers and cedar fences don't go so well together.  Well, it didn't damage the wood hardly at all, so I'm all good over here.  Super short video of my somewhat therapeutic experience posted over at the Instagram page (https://www.instagram.com/boringoldmanstuff/) just in the event you're bored and need a short idea of what I'm up against here.

Now I have this fence, cleaned of all it's soot and lichen in all it's not so white glory.  Some parts are almost white washed, some parts are white and then there are the parts that are just plane old wood.  Time to deal with that right?  Slap a coat of paint on this pig and call it pretty.  Not so fast.  You see, I

already told you that there are some rotten sections, broken pieces and such.  Oh, I also didn't mention before that we live on a hill, and the neighbor just on the other side of the fence is uphill.  They are really quite, nice people, but keep to themselves mostly.  Well, they don't keep their mulch to themselves.  I don't really know what's going on over there on that side of the fence, but clearly they are just piling up mulch about a foot high on their side, right against the wood.  Cause the fence is 2 inches of the ground on my side, but rotting from the ground up.  You can see clear as day under the boards, that the dirt is just pushed up against the fence.  Let me hear you now!  You can't do that man.  It's not even reasonable.  You know how much a cedar fence costs?  Whatever.  Sucks.

So, I decide it's time to replace some boards.  Just going to do some bad ones, not the whole shebang.  So I cruise down to the LowDepot-ish store, specifically the orange one.  So dope, they have just stacks and stacks of cedar fence boards.  Mine are the type that are cut with dog ears, basically just the top corners chopped off.  Looks good for a simple fence.  Dresses it up a bit.  You know what's stupid?  How much they charge extra for those pieces with 2 small cuts made.  It was something like  a buck extra on a board that day.  And I paid $1.87 per board, so a buck extra is not insignificant.  For those keeping track, that's like an extra third of the price.  Over the full project, that means the wood would cost me only 2/3 the price if I cut it myself.  You following that math?  (1/3 + 2/3 = 1) ~ rocket

science.  So, no choice, gotta cut my own dog ears.  Let's talk about what doesn't matter though, yep, that.  It's not even an important factor when you run down to the orange store, swing over to the fence boards, then grab 50 boards and roll out.  It's nice that it's a no-brainer.  It's like a curated fence board selection.  Do you want dog ears, or square corners?  Ok, here is your stack, easy as that.  Buy them, bring them home, take one over to mark a template for the dog ear cutting, oh crap.  These are way too small.  Not too short, too narrow.  Wait, what?  But orange store only had 1 width, 5 & 3/8 inches.  Oh crap, this fence has 7.5" boards.  Now I need to call around town, check the blue store, then the other smaller lumberyard type stores, that whole deal.  So I did.  Since the boards from orange and blue stores are 5.375" (5&3/8 inches), they call that 6" by the way, for those of you who don't know, here is another math lesson, 5.375 <> 6.  Honestly, there is only one person I know who seems to think that 5.375 would even round up to 6 (he is wrong by the way, that's not how any of this works).  In any case in modern civilization 5.375 = 5.375.  In some cases, we'd call that 5, in fancy talk you can call that rounding, but when you're doing math, use the decimal places, they win every time.  Ok, so then following this logic, y'all realize that the 7.5" board that I need also isn't called 7.5" right?  I have to find 8 inchers.  So easy to keep track of all of this.  I can't even keep these numbers straights as I type this.  I just stepped away to measure these boards so I got it all right here.  The point is, this is really a bit confusing when you're a rookie trying to just do a simple weekend project.

So I'm calling around to find said 8" (but not really 8") boards.  You know what I found?  Only 1 specialty store in my area stocks that stuff.  Know how much? $6.25 per board.  Yes, for those keeping track 334.22% of the price of my on-sale little orange store boards.  Dude, ghetto.
So here I am, back in this stupid dilemma of wishing I was just replacing the whole fence.  You know what's not going to look the same?  5.25" boards with spacers on either side that are an extra inch wide.  Oh well.  At least I'll paint them white.  They'll look good enough for about 20 more years.