Yard Work

June 24, 2024

A year ago we were still talking about our wood picket fence replacement. Finally we chose the contractor who gave us a discount. We were relieved to get it done. Later I noticed some of the segments were a little out of line, some installed higher in the earth than others. Was it the slope of the terrain? Or me picking the low bidder and not checking his work.

The new fence was treated for moisture protection, so we thought. Now the anchor posts, pickets, and crossbars were dark and gray. The contractor had quoted $500 for painting, another guy said $800. As usual with home improvement, we put it off.

Here we encountered the homeowner’s perennial conundrum: which repairs and upgrades do you contract out and which do you attempt? After all, people who would never unclog a toilet will hammer a nail to hang a picture, or even mow the lawn. Actually, around here few people mow lawns. Our next-door neighbor, whose postage-stamp-size lawn is smaller than ours, contracts for mowing.

At the time, $800 or even $500 seemed like a lot to paint our fence, which is all of 185 feet long across level ground. Now, a year later, it would cost more. So—obviously, that is, to me—this would be “do it yourself.” It would involve no climbing or heavy lifting. It was not time-sensitive—we already had let it go a year. It would require no complicated, expensive tools or materials. It’s painting, after all.

We’re veteran painters. Over 20 years we painted the interior walls of our Virginia house two or three times. The worst of it was covering a rich, deep red with light gray. The red shone through one coat of the gray, even with primer, then two coats. Eventually we needed five coats, drawing our rollers over the same square footage again and again. Lesson: never paint your walls red.

You can gaze at something you want to change in or around your home and envision the work completed. We had looked at the deep red of our walls we had tired of and saw instead the delicate light gray we had chosen to replace it. Now I stared out at the dingy gray pickets and saw them as bright, glowing white. But we had to actually do the work.

At Home Depot I asked the paint guy for three gallons of white. Three gallons seemed like a start. He reached beneath the shelves and pulled out a five-gallon drum and carried it to the counter. “Five gallons works out cheaper,” he said. He lifted it into my shopping cart, and this was a skinny guy.

In the parking lot I strained to lift the drum into the van, it must have weighed 100 pounds. I heaved it in and stood for a moment catching my breath. At home I lifted it out and paused again, gasping. I shoved it in the garage.

Part of the DIY plan was to hire the grandsons, pay them a few bucks, let them paint for a couple of hours, or until they got tired. They could slap paint on and learn the rewards of work. They could be my Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn, I would be Aunt Polly. The ten-year-old proposed $75.00 for two hours’ work. I thought, whoa, let’s talk about it.

That would be a few weeks off. Painting to protect the fence from moisture meant more than slapping paint. The edges of each picket had to be painted. And the crossbars and undersides. And the undersides of the crossbars, both upper and lower.

I walked the length of the fence and counted: 288 individual pickets. Most of the undersides of the pickets were embedded in the soil. That meant excavating an inch or two beneath the surface to unearth them, just to draw a single brush stroke across the underside. Would a contractor do that for a $500 paint job? I don’t think so.

The work suddenly got complicated. Utilities run beneath the yard and beneath the fence. We called the utility people to mark the gas, electrical, and fiber-optic lines so I didn’t cut them with my shovel. They spray-painted the line paths in yellow, red, orange. The orange ran under the fence at a couple of points.

In mid-June South Carolina is hot. One side of the fence is shaded, the other two stand all day in the blazing sun. I had bought the paint ($200.00) and brushes. No turning back. Slowly, deliberately, I started at the north end and brushed grass away from the pickets. One picket, two, three. I dug down, clearing soil. The sun broiled the yard. I gulped water.

I set the shovel down and painted the lower 12 inches and the undersides and edges of the half-dozen pickets I had excavated. I moved on and cleared another half-dozen or so. I quit after an hour, went inside, got out of my dirty, sweaty clothes and sprawled in a chair.

The next day I clipped away the brush and weeds on the easement side of the fence facing the neighbor’s yard, tearing through his overgrown ivy. I pounded away with my shovel, picket after picket, two, four, six, ten.

For the painting I lay on my back on a tarp and daubed at the edges and undersides. I stretched and twisted, reaching behind my head in yoga-like positions to do the hard-to-reach edges. One picket, two, three, and on and on. In the far corner of the yard I tore through weeds and old shrubbery to access the pickets. I dug and painted, dug and painted.

This went on. Days later I finished the shaded side of the yard and emerged in the 85F-plus sunlight. I pulled my tarp forward, painted a few more pickets. At the far end of the yard the pickets were embedded in tough weeds and tree roots. I chopped away with the shovel to get to the picket ends and finished a few more.

Each morning I stirred the paint, poured it in a pail and painted away, dug away, painted a little more, pausing to gulp water. On Father’s Day afternoon I was out there, digging and painting. I turned the last corner of the yard and pruned the sharp leaves of a yucca plant that grew hard against the fence.

The next morning my neck, shoulders, and arms ached, as they had ached for a week. I stirred my paint and grabbed my shovel, the blade now dulled by unearthing thousands of rocks and chopping thousands of tree roots.

I finished the last picket of the final section, which met the gate on the south end of the yard. I tossed the brush on the tarp and leaned on the shovel and looked at the work. The lower 12 inches of each picket gleamed uniformly white, like well-polished teeth. The upper ends remained bare, dingy, waiting for paint. The grandsons will take care of it. That’s the plan.