DIY Pool Safety Fence: Marking And Setting Your Posts

| Friday, July 15, 2011
By Anne Hetris


As if having a pool put isn't expensive enough but then you have to pay to have a fence put around it, and that also costs money. This is why if you are like so many homeowners today, you're thinking of saving money by doing the fence installation yourself. The big challenge you face though, is having your finished work come out looking like a professional job.

So then to keep it nice and simple and make it a heck of a lot easier on yourself you would be well advised to go with a standard cedar slat fence. The type that's sheathed with 1 x 6 boards that have a dog eared top. In fact to better familiarize yourself with this style of fencing, just hop in your car and take a drive around your neighbourhood. It's one of the more common styles of fencing. Sometimes it's painted but most of the time not.

Make it even easier on yourself by not even thinking about the finished fence. That all goes together after you've finished installing the main frame, so let's just focus on that. Get a nice solid frame built, and the rest of the fence will go on real nicely. So the first thing you want to make a point of doing, is buying four-by-four post stock that's longer than you think you need, to insure that you don't come up short. Buy ten footers, and you can lop any excess off.

Then one huge mistake that you don't want to make before you even get started is to plot out your fence lines outside of your property boundary. Think it's hard to do? Well you're wrong because it happens quite frequently. Now there may be some type of survey markers but people have been known to move them and that's where a lot of the problems come from. So take a trip down to your county land records office of you have any questions.

Next, assuming that you're sure about your boundary lines, go ahead and pound a nice solid stake in at each corner where your fence is going. Then after you have done that, you need to run string likes between each stake to delineate your actual fence lines. Pull the string nice and tight then tie it off. Next take a tape measure, and a felt tip marker and make a mark every "eight feet" on your stings to show where each post will go.

Simply pound a small stake into the ground below each mark on the stings. Those small stakes are your reference markers for digging "nice & roomy" 2 foot deep holes for your posts. After that task has been done, simply drop the posts into their holes with a generous amount of cement, plumb them up with a level, brace them off, and allow the cement to cure for about a day before you start in building your framework.




About the Author:



0 comments:

Post a Comment