How To Build A Fence From A Slab With Your Own Hands - Step By Step Instructions With Photos And Videos

2024 Author: Bailey Albertson | [email protected]. Last modified: 2024-01-17 22:26

How to build a slab fence yourself?

Building a new fence around a summer cottage or estate is not a cheap pleasure, even if you take the most modest version of a translucent fence made of a metal mesh-netting. But if you wish and with some skill, you can build a fence with your own hands at minimal cost, using one of the waste of woodworking - a slab. To get a decent fence from this timber, you need two things: to understand the construction technology and, spending some amount of time and effort, build a fence from an unedged board with your own hands.

Content

• 1 Using a slab - pros and cons
• 2 Options for fences made of unedged boards in the photo
• 3 Recommendations for the choice of timber
• 4 Calculation of the length of the fence
• 5 How much to cook materials and tools

• 6 How to make a beautiful slab fence in the country with your own hands: the whole step-by-step process

  • 6.1 Site marking
  • 6.2 Barking and slab processing
  • 6.3 Wood debarking video
  • 6.4 Installing poles
  • 6.5 Construction of the fence
  • 6.6 Video material on slab fences
• 7 Tips for finishing and wood care
• 8 How to paint a wooden picket fence - video

Slab use - pros and cons

When at a woodworking enterprise, logs are sawn into boards of different thicknesses, then the lateral parts of the trunks, which have a hemispherical shape on one side, go to waste. These are the slabs that zealous owners often buy for firewood due to their penny cost.

Lumber classification

Croaker - waste sawing tree trunks

As a material for the construction of a fence, the slab has the following advantages:

1. Low price is the main advantage of timber. If you consider that you are planning to build a fence with your own hands, then its total cost will consist only of the purchase and transportation costs plus money for fasteners (nails).
2. Any tree, including the side parts of the logs, is easy to handle.
3. Although the slab belongs to sawing waste, it remains wood and retains all its properties - environmental friendliness and durability when properly processed.
4. It is difficult to find more suitable timber if you need to quickly make a temporary fence.

Finished fence span made of croaker

The advantages of the material also depend on the type of wood that was cut on the sawmill. In terms of hardness and durability, oak, larch and beech are the leaders, followed by conifers and aspen. Coniferous timber - pine and spruce - is most often used in construction.

Having conceived to build a fence from slabs, prepare to put up with its shortcomings:

• unsightly appearance of the material will require significant labor costs for upgrading;
• it is not easy to find the required number of products with flat sides and approximately the same width, from which it is more convenient to build a fence;
• without sanding (otherwise - debarking) and special antiseptic treatment, the service life of the fence will be significantly reduced.

A fence made of raw material looks rather ugly

Options for fences made of unedged boards in the photo

Here the slab serves as a pretty filling for the gate frames.

A successful combination of a concrete eurofence with wood filling

Even a crooked and gnarled slab can be successfully used for a picket fence

A graceful hedge made of slabs nested between the posts

Here the slab is inserted into a frame of metal pipes

Option for a hedge with a stone base

Slabs can be attached to the posts horizontally, and the joints can be covered with vertical slats

Recommendations for choosing timber

The selection of sawing waste depends on the fence design you have chosen. If it is necessary to put a solid picket fence without gaps, then it is advisable to pick up slabs with even edges, otherwise they will have to be worked on with an ax or a plane. For a picket fence with gaps, the requirements are not so stringent; uneven boards will also do. The main thing is to arrange them correctly so that the fence looks aesthetically pleasing.

Not all of this waste is suitable for fence

When selecting material, follow these recommendations:

1. Try to select wider and thicker slabs. Some of them can be cut to length and get a decent beam suitable for posts.
2. Avoid buying trimmings of logs felled during the warm season and left outdoors for a long time. Under the bark of such material, the wood is often affected by mold and pests. In winter, you can buy stale forest calmly, since bacteria and pests are inactive in the cold.
3. Do not take frankly raw timber, it will crack and warp as it dries, which will make the built fence lose its appearance.
4. Don't buy a slab that is too narrow and thin. To collect a picket fence, you will need a large number of narrow boards, and it is very inconvenient to remove the bark from thin scraps.

It is better to take a ready-made timber on the pillars

A separate issue is the choice of lumber for poles. For a temporary fence around the site, supports from two slabs nailed down will fit. A structure designed for a long service life (15-20 years) should be placed on pillars made of timber with a section of 10x10 cm or round timber with a diameter of 80-100 mm. The crossbeams can be made from thick scraps or a 60x40 mm timber. For more capital fencing up to 2.5 m high, you will need metal pipes of a round or rectangular section measuring 40x60 mm (for a solid picket fence) or 40x40 mm (for a fence with gaps).

Calculation of the length of the fence

Before purchasing timber and other auxiliary materials, it is necessary to calculate their quantity. To do this, you need to determine the total length of the fence using one of two methods:

• calculation of the fence over the area of the site;
• determination of external dimensions according to land documents;
• full-scale measurement of the sides of the site.

The perimeter of a square area is easy to calculate through the area

The first method is convenient only when you need to calculate the length of the fence in a square-shaped area with straight boundaries. You need to take the area value, extract the square root from it and get the length of one side. It remains to multiply it by 4 and get the perimeter, this is the length of the fence. For other forms, this technique is not suitable, because with the same area, the perimeter of a rectangular section is larger than that of a square one.

A rectangular section of the same area has a larger perimeter

The second method is also convenient because it does not require time and labor. In the documents, a plan of the land plot is drawn, where all the required dimensions are indicated. But if there are no such documents or the calculation needs to be clarified, then the best method is to measure the area with a tape measure or a laser rangefinder, then you definitely will not be mistaken when purchasing timber.

How much materials and tools to cook

As a rule, the owners of country cottages and private houses erect solid picket fences with a height of 2 m from the slab so that people passing by will look less into the yard. The arrangement of the pickets is vertical, this is the simplest option. The distance between the posts is taken to be 2.5 m, and the length of the bars for the supports is 3 m (the third part is immersed in the ground). The calculation of the amount of timber is performed as follows:

1. The number of posts is equal to the total length of the fence divided by the distance between them. Here you need to add supports for the gate and wicket.
2. The total length of the horizontal lintels is equal to the length of the hedge multiplied by 2 plus 10-15% by trimmings, overlaps and other waste. The number of boards depends on their size and is determined by dividing the resulting figure by their length with a small margin.
3. The number of pickets for a solid fence can be found by dividing its length by the average width of the slabs.

Antiseptic to protect wood

Other materials will be needed for construction:

• antiseptic for pre-treatment (for example, Biosept or Novotex);
• nails 10-15 cm long, depending on the thickness of the lumber;
• cement M400, sand and crushed stone for concreting supports;
• bituminous mastic or resin to cover the underground part of the posts.

Mastic for wooden posts

To make a fence from a slab with your own hands, you need to have the following tool:

• measuring devices - tape measure, building level, laser rangefinder (if any);
• cord with pegs for marking the site;
• scraper and ax for debarking and processing wood;
• plane, hammer and hacksaw for wood;
• wide brush;
• drill or shovel for digging holes;
• concrete mixer or sheet of iron for manual preparation of mortar.

Fence installation tool kit

How to make a beautiful slab fence in the country with your own hands: the whole step-by-step process

The process of erecting a wooden picket fence from woodworking waste is divided into the following stages:

1. Laying the route of the future fencing, marking places for the installation of poles.
2. Removing the bark from the slab and antiseptic treatment.
3. Installation of supports.
4. Fastening of crossbars and picket strips.

Each of the steps will take you a long time, so expect to complete them in a few days. The process can be accelerated if you can get helpers to do other things in parallel. In winter, it is not recommended to build a fence, since it will be difficult to drill holes, and all the work will stretch for a long time due to the cold.

Plot marking

End peg with tied cord

Before you start measuring and installing pegs, check the land documentation and coordinate your actions with your neighbors, so that later there will be no disputes due to an incorrectly installed fence. Then work in this order:

1. Locate the corner points of the allotment and drive in the stakes there.
2. Pull the cord between the pegs.
3. Walking along the cord with a tape measure, mark the locations of the supports (the standard is every 2.5 m). You can do otherwise, dividing the entire length into equal intervals ranging from 2 to 2.5 m, so that at the end you do not get one short span.
4. Without removing the cord, drill holes 1 m deep at the designated points.

Pole installation locations

If you plan to erect a fence 2.5-3 m high, then it is necessary to take into account the increase in windage and wind load on the fence acting from the side. The step of mounting the supports must be reduced to 2 m, and deepened into the ground by 1.2-1.4 m.

With the help of a gasoline drill, it is more convenient and faster to make holes than manual

Barking and slab processing

As practice shows, tested by many generations of residents of Russia, it is best to remove the bark from a tree with a scraper. This is a steel sharpened strip with two handles, for which you need to pull the tool along the trunk, peeling off the bark - to scrape. Unlike an ax, a pointed shovel and a power tool, the scraper does not damage the top layer of wood during operation, thereby increasing its service life.

Barking with a scraper

At this stage, work is carried out in the following sequence:

1. Install the slab vertically, resting it on any structure.
2. Debark by moving the scraper from top to bottom.
3. If necessary, remove the knots and level the plank around the edges using an ax and a plane.
4. Apply antiseptic to the tree with a brush and let it dry.

This is the most time consuming procedure when building a fence. The longer your fence, the more material you have to recycle. Together with an assistant, things will move faster.

Debarking video

Installation of pillars

Fence posts can be installed in the following ways:

• driving into wells whose diameter is slightly less than the cross-section of the bar;
• backed-up installation;
• concreting;
• deep concreting with soil replacement.

When using wooden supports, the first 2 options are most often used. First, the ends of the posts are covered with a layer of bitumen mastic or resin, after which they are driven into the finished wells. Then the soil is backfilled and tamped around the post. In the second method, a hole is dug, a support is installed in it and wedged from all sides by stones, after which a liquid clay solution is poured into it.

A crushed stone is added under the rack

Both steel and wooden pillars can be concreted, only the anchoring parts are welded to the first - pieces of corners or reinforcement that firmly hold the pipe in concrete. A combined method is also practiced - a steel pipe is concreted in the ground, and a support made of wood is attached to it from above. Regardless of the option chosen, the work is carried out as follows:

1. Fill the bottom of the pit with rubble to a height of 5 cm and tamp it.
2. Using the level, place the stand strictly vertically and fix it by nailing the support bars.
3. Mix 1 volume of M400 cement with 4 of the same volumes of sand and 6 parts of crushed stone, add water and prepare M100 concrete.
4. Concrete the racks by filling the pits to the top with the mixture. Further work is carried out after the concrete has hardened (at least 2 weeks).

When installing the post, you must maintain the vertical

Concrete rack

In the vastness of the Federation, super-moist soils are often found, subject to frost swelling. In winter, they push out any objects that are in the soil freezing zone. In such conditions, concreting is carried out below this boundary, and on top of the wet soil near the pillar is replaced with a mixture of rubble and sand.

In heaving soil, concrete is poured below the freezing line

Construction of a fence

The final stage of construction consists in the installation of lags (crossbars) and the fastening of the pickets. Wait until the concrete mixture has completely solidified and proceed with the installation, observing the following procedure:

1. Nail the crossbars to the posts. If you use wooden beams as a log, they should be adjusted to the level. It is better to align the slabs "by eye", for which the assistant needs to move a few meters and adjust the position of the crossbar.
2. Adjacent timber cross-members can be fastened end-to-end or vertically stacked on top of each other. Slab lags are allowed to overlap.
3. Nail the first picket fence, aligning the vertical to the level. At each point of attachment to the logs, drive at least two nails.
4. Attach the rest of the pickets by pressing together and periodically checking the vertical.

Wiring diagram of a wooden picket fence

Installation of picket strips

To protect the upper end of the slats from precipitation and rapid destruction, fill a visor from the same slab on top. On this, the construction of the fence is considered complete.

Slab fences video

Tips for finishing and wood care

In addition to treatment with an antiseptic composition, it is desirable to additionally protect a wooden fence from external influences. For finishing wood on the street, there are the following methods of exterior decoration:

1. Painting with waterproof acrylic compounds 2 times over the primer layer.
2. If there are no special requirements for the appearance of the fence, then the tree can be impregnated with used oil or bitumen. For fear of getting dirty from head to toe, local thieves are unlikely to want to climb over such a fence to your site.
3. Cover with homemade Swedish paint that protects against pests and precipitation as well as antiseptics.
4. For gourmets, opening wooden surfaces with several layers of varnish using artificial blackening made with wood stain is suitable.

Beautifully painted fence with a visor

The ends of the slabs can be beautifully cut and then painted

Recently, Swedish paint has gained popularity, which has a remarkable red color and is prepared by hand. You will need the following components:

• ordinary salt - 250 g;
• iron red lead - 240 g;
• copper sulfate (otherwise - copper sulfate) - 250 g;
• drying oil - 230 ml;
• flour - 500 g.

Fence painted with Swedish paint

Pour flour into water (3 liters) and boil the paste. Strain it through cheesecloth, add drying oil there, then salt, red lead and vitriol, while heating the mixture over low heat. At the end, add another 1.5 liters of water and mix well. The predicted consumption of Swedish paint is 200-250 g / m2 ^of surface area.

How to paint a wooden picket fence - video

As you can see, the construction of a slab fence is not a super-difficult job, although you will have to work a lot. On the other hand, the high labor intensity is compensated by the low costs of building the fence. To make the best use of your personal time, break the entire process down into steps and follow each step whenever possible. This is especially true for owners of large plots, fenced off from all sides. In such a situation, it makes sense to put the fence in parts, starting from the front border.