The Crooked Cottage: A white picket fence

Turns out this is a historic post now - took me a long time to actually post it up!

After having a bit of a break from our renovations I upped the ante again to try to get things going again.

And first up was the fence.

The picket fence (on top of the green painted sandstone monstrosity) was rotting and paint peeling and cracking. At first I thought that we could just slap another layer of paint on and cover it up. I had planned to replace a few palings as needed, but thought I could do a bit of patch up job.

I pulled one of the rough palings off and took it to Fedwood, which is just up the road in Rozelle. I discovered that to have the palings custom made to match the previous ones (which were bevelled edge) would cost $7 a paling. Which seemed kind of expensive, especially when their run of the mill palings are a lot cheaper.

I got a quote to have the fence replaced and it came to about $4000, which again seemed to be expensive!

After discussions with my neighbour I struck upon a much better plan. Another neighbour (this is a great street!) is a builder and so he was able to put the fence in for us. We just paid for materials and labour and hey presto, a fence for significantly less!

But then we had to paint it. (mind you I was going to have to paint it for the $4000 too!) So I started with a brush, but it looked kind of streaky. Then I tried a roller, but it seemed very thin. And my final attempt was with a spray gun. I had a few false starts, as the paint was very spattered when it came out , but once I diluted it up more, the spray gun was the winner. It gives a much more consistent coverage. My poor husband got the job of holding up a drop sheet so that I didn't paint the cars on the street - not the most fun job but it did seem necessary, as we didn't have any other way of holding it up.

I was pretty pleased with myself when one of my neighbours came past and told me how good it looked - and then said "I'll pay you to do mine!" Don't think I'll be becoming a professional painter any time soon, but I figured it must look not too bad.

So we have a lovely new white picket fence. Add some silver numbers for the street number and a fairly stock standard letterbox and it's all good. Mind you after a eighteen months or so (it takes me a long time to put up these blog posts!) it looks like it needs repainting already if you look at it too closely...