Not your ordinary fence

So I found an excuse to use power tools again.  I recently added a fence by my house; actually I’m still working on it.  I thought this would be a good opportunity to add some design to what would be an ordinary fence otherwise.  I asked the fence company to build me a 6’ cedar fence base with 8’ posts.  I also requested to run the top of the fence level, which ordinarily would just follow the grade.  The part I decided to build myself is the top two feet of the horizontal slats and framing behind it.  I’m also planning to build custom post caps.

As to the materials and details, I used #1 (tight knot grade) cedar boards.  I found that the local big box stores carry a limited selection of highly-overpriced and not-so-nice cedar.  I ended up buying mine from a lumber supply store in Hampton, where the quality of material is better and at a third of the price.  To get the 2” slats I had to rip 4” boards in half.   I also went with aluminum nails to eliminate any chance of future staining from corroding nails.  I only used galvanized nails on the pressure-treated framing behind.

Here is the current progress shot:

3D model built before I started:

The earlier progress:

…and here is what I got tired of looking at:

  Mariusz Mijal