Henry Family Blog

Fixing the 6-foot wood fence was more difficult than I expected.  The back part of our property is enclosed by a 6-foot wood fence.  There are three gates, one on either side of the house, and one directly in the back.  When we bought the house, the gate to the left of the house would not open, seemed to be stuck.  It was of no serious concern since there were more gates.  One day while cutting the grass, I decided it would be easier if the gate on the left would open so to make the cutting easier.

A couple of weeks ago I went out to see why it wouldn’t open, and found that it all had to do with huge roots from a tree.  The previous owner had planted a tree right next to the fence.  Well, this tree has grown, it is a beautiful tree, but the roots have grown along the length of the fence, right under the wood.  These roots are huge.  The circumference of some of the roots are larger than the circumference of the tree itself.  Notice the photo I took, just to give some reference, I threw my size 14 flip-flop next to some of the roots.

The major problem was that the roots were pushing the fence up higher on one side of the gate than the other, and were growing into the fence wood itself in certain areas.  What this means is that there were two reasons the gate wouldn’t open.  The first was that the gate was getting pushed from the bottom right which made the top left side wedge against the post, and the huge roots were growing into the fence planks all along the fence line.

I knew I needed some serious equipment, like a large chainsaw and some tools like that.  There is only one person to call, and that was my father-in-law Maurice.  Maurice has everything, I mean everything.  If you need it, he has at least 3 of them.  So I called and he came over with his van and equipment.  I dug around the roots so to get the dirt out, and Maurice started cutting.  Did I mention the roots were huge?  The more we dug and cut, the more we realized how large and long these roots were.  Then came another surprise, the previous owner had planted some kind of swamp bush tree thing (from here on known as swamp thing) next to the house, and it turns out that it had huge roots too.  The roots of swamp thing headed along the same path as the other huge roots, but in the opposite direction.  This worried me because my house sits on a slab, and I did not want any of these roots growing under the slab and damaging the house.  Well, all of these roots were running right into the house.  Maurice and I dug and cut out all of the pieces of root we could without damaging anything else. 

This is Maurice.

Now for fixing the fence.  I had to remove several planks that had been damaged by the root.  While doing this, I noticed that most of the nails in the planks were rusty and bent.  First, I took a pencil and marked on the planks where they needed to be cut so to fit around the roots that we could not cut out.  I then carried the planks to the backyard and used a jigsaw to cut the boards in the appropriate places.  I then held them up to make sure they would fit correctly, then used long wood screws instead of nails to fasten them back to the posts.  The wood screws seem to hold much better.  Then came fixing the gate.  The only inexpensive way to fix the gate was to cut the gate at the top vertically at a slight angle down to make it close correctly.  I could not use the jigsaw or any other saw I had because of the angle and height of the fence.  I needed an old fashioned hand saw. 

Saturday morning Steph, James and I went to yard sales, and guess what I found?  Two hand saws which I paid $3.00 for both.  I got home and went to work, but had to stop half way through finishing because family duty called.  Weather willing, I will finish tomorrow and let you know how it turns out.

Tags: Yard sales //