How To Build A Fence Without Building A Fence

4 Materials
$300
2 Days
Medium

If you read my last Lockwood reno post you will know that when we moved into our house it was surrounded by trees. In fact, one of our neighbours said our house looked like a ‘ghost house’ because it was so dark and eerie!


With the trees gone to let in the light we found that we had very little privacy, so we decided we needed a new fence. Our original fence looked like this (after a good clean!).


If you would like to see more of our renovation please visit the Renovate Section of my blog.

It was too short, and it had gaps between each of the palings. We knew we didn’t have the budget to build an entirely new fence so, we decided to put our thinking caps on and come up with a cheaper, better solution.


This is the result.

So, what did we do?


We bought some 74mm rough sawn palings and we nailed them up over the gaps which resulted in this.

After that we needed to tackle the problem of the fence being too short. The pavement outside our house is higher than the land our house sits on which means that everyone walking by is about the right height to look right in the windows.


We decided to add the trellis. Of course, trellis doesn’t come in exactly the right size, so we bought larger pieces and cut them to size, then we put the edging around them. 


We also added the long white upright palings which make it ‘look like’ the fence had some nice new posts.

A nice two-toned paint job and we were done. 


I make it sound soooo easy don’t I. I can tell you it wasn’t. Old houses (and fences) were constructed using imperial measurements and we now use the metric system. This means that nothing translates to quite the right measurements.

Anyway, we now have a beautiful fence which is high enough and provides enough privacy for our new garden. I’ll post about the new garden soon.

Resources for this project:
See all materials
Any price and availability information displayed on [relevant Amazon Site(s), as applicable] at the time of purchase will apply to the purchase of this product.
Hometalk may collect a small share of sales from the links on this page.More info
Living a Real Life
Want more details about this and other DIY projects? Check out my blog post!
Go
Frequently asked questions
Have a question about this project?
  2 questions
  • Susan Caswell Susan Caswell on Dec 20, 2020

    What are Imperial measurements? I'm in the USA.

  • Bourbonwife Bourbonwife on Jun 08, 2021

    amazing idea. i wish i could do this. however, we have the pvc vinyl white picket fence. any ideas on how we can attach anything to create some privacy between each section and how to make it higher similar to yours? i’m kind of desperate. thanks!

Comments
Join the conversation
2 of 54 comments
Next