More fencing, more... sick

So, our more astute and observant readers may have noticed in the last post that our careful and awesome fencing job left something of a gap between the new fence and the house. (Visible here.)

Well, after a little consideration, we decided that the gap was a little too big, and allowed a little too much view of our back yard to any casual passers-by on the street. In short, anyone walking by our house could look right down the hedge, into the back yard, and even into the park beyond. That would just not do at all, and so we took it upon ourselves to head off to Rona to buy a couple of cedar 2x4's, a box of good quality coated screws, and a couple dozen cedar fence boards.

We's gonna build us another fence!

This one, fortunately, would not involve a power auger, or indeed, any digging at all. We simply attached a pressure-treated 2x4 to the house (yay! TapCons!), a couple of stacked cedar 2x4's to the fence panel, and built a simple frame. Then we attached the fence uprights with a few finishing nails and voila!





Okay, so it was a bit harder than that - it was actually a full day's worth of work for the two of us, but it looks pretty good, even up against the manufactured panels.

Anyway, that's all the pictures for this post, but as a special bonus, we have a long-overdue return of everyone's favorite feature,

The Injury Report

So, part of our restructuring and re-tooling the fence involved reworking the gate for the neighbors. You see, when we originally hung it, the two posts on either side weren't quite exactly plumb, so we had to use shims to space out the 2x4 we used as a door jamb. Well, the shims worked... sort of. Meaning they looked ugly, and the door didn't close very well at all.

The fix was to take the gate and jamb apart, and to trim down the 2x4 so we wouldn't need the shims. This would require some rather tricky free-handing on the table saw -- but don't worry, this isn't an Injury Report about the table saw... well, not about the blade anyway.

To cut a long story short, apparently when you cut or sand cedar, you should really wear a dust mask. The reason for this is that the dust can carry microbes or bacteria from within the wood into your airways, or just irritate your breathing passages enough that whatever bacteria is in the air is more likely to infect you.

I spent the last three days lying on the couch with a nasty, nasty head cold and brutal cough.

Yuck.