Over the years we’ve put a lot of work into our old house. The heavy difficult work is all behind us, and we like the results. But the back yard remains an unfinished project. There are some great features there, notably a big sequoia and some yellow cedar benches that I made a long time ago. But it all looks a bit dishevelled. This summer we took our first steps toward resolving that.

We did not have a comprehensive plan for the whole back yard, but we knew that a fence along the south boundary would help to define the space and would help to keep the deer out of the yard, or at least slow them down. The deer love our back yard.

I had a couple of design issues in mind. I wanted the fence to match the back porch and the garden garage that I built a few years ago. I also wanted to avoid placing fence posts in the ground. The back yard gets wet in the winter and fence posts would rot out before too long. So that meant pouring concrete footings and connecting the fence posts to steel channel. And that meant I first had to build forms that would hold the steel in place. My friend Alex helped with mixing and pouring the concrete, which made that work fun and sociable.

Like the garden garage, the structural elements of the fence were held together using mortise and tenon joinery so there were a lot of mortises and tenons to cut. And assembling the fence was a bit like assembling a puzzle. but it all went smoothly.

We decided to have three different kinds of panels in the fence. In the back corner we had two woven cedar panels, matching the garden garage, to create a quiet secluded corner. There are two trellis panels made of 3/4” x 3/4” cedar, and the remaining panels are welded wire agricultural fence. The 6” x 6” cedar posts on our back porch are topped with ipe finials, we decided to give the same treatment to the 4” x 4” fence posts.

The whole process was made easier by our neighbour Betty who graciously let me do most of the construction from her property.

There’s still work to do. We plan to paint the fence to match the back porch, and we plan to build a small stone patio in the back corner. Then we need to figure out where the garden and olive trees go …

Red Cedar, Ipe.