oh so you gotta admit for only being four and a half months old that is an amazing looking lawn right there that's from seed it was all dirt and that is now a zoyja lawn four and a half months old but today i'm going to talk to you about the picket fence we got putting in so hold on oh hey guys doc do it yourself pick a fence i know what the first comment is gonna be oh it's do it yourself and you paid someone to do it there's a reason for that kurt who i trust 100 percent did my fence here i made a video i showed him how to make this fence he came here he did it he's fantastic he really has this artisan sort of touch and supplies are limited he can get all the supplies we live on an island i don't have the resources to be able to go pick up all these supplies they knocked it out just the two of them him and his worker they knocked it out in a day and a half or less so that's why i had him do it so there's only four things that you really need to make this number one pressure treated post four by four posts all we're going to do is we're going to post hold down probably about three feet put cement in left them tall and then cut them afterwards next pressure treated two by fours the two by fours go on the posts and that's where the pickets are gonna line up that's it basically it's eight foot sections the posts are set up eight foot sections for the most part not all one by four pressure treated wood so that's a one by four it actually measures three and a half what they did is they cut 45s they just made traditional 45 pickets i wanted this to be an old timey looking picket fence so that's why we had it cut this way we didn't want anything super fancy on scrolling on the top and then the caps we bought caps for the wood posts you can get them at lowe's or home depot you know just nice little wooden caps the fence is going to be stained with a oil-based solid white stain it that actually absorbs really well into the wood once this is dry and later on if you want to paint over that you can but that stain process that white solid stain will look really good on this fence the moisture content of this wood is super super high i'll tell you right now so i would say it's like an 80 moisture content it's heavy and it's soaking wet so you really have to let this fence sit for probably a good two weeks of good sunny weather to get that moisture content down to the point that will really suck up the stain kurt actually said hey i'm going fishing next week so it worked out perfect he's going to come back in two weeks and restain the fence but today i'm just going to give you a couple tips and show you a few things i did differently about the design of this and i'll show you why i did it too so the first thing i did uh you have to make sure check with your city code we're allowed to have a 36 inch tall picket fence so i wanted to be real careful so i actually dropped the highest point on this fence is right at 36. so initially these pickets were cut so if you want a 36 inch picket fence these would normally be cut at 34 and then you'd have about a two inch gap underneath i wanted to make sure my fence was low there's a reason for that because of city codes and the way that it sits my lawn's a little bit taller i didn't want to block the intersection view so i actually said sorry guys i'm going to do something bad to you i'm going to make you re-cut all these pickets down to 32. so we actually cut these pickets down to 32 and that kept everything small so my fence is actually a little bit smaller than a true 36-inch picket fence you'll notice that when they install the rails they have the rails follow the contour of the land and that's really kind of what you want to do so you if you have a little bit of a slope down your rail would actually follow so it follows the land and that's the way it looks better the pickets however you put your pickets on it so even if you have a rail that's like this your pickets will be perpendicular to the ground so you actually take a level and make sure the picket is level you'll see them doing that and they're just going to use one general nail right in the center and right in the center just one non-rusting on the two by fours uh i had to get a revocable use license because my fence actually extends off my property line to the corner of the um it goes off the property line into an easement so i had to get a revocable use which means at any time the city can come in and take down my fence so what i did is i told them i said i want you to use screws on this so that if at any time the city needs to come in and do work on a power line or water main or something all we have to do is we unscrew this whole fence panel and take it off the only thing we might lose is we might lose a fence post which can be pulled out and replaced okay so that's about it i did go back there is a little bit of difference on the contour at the bottom and i wanted to leave about a two inch gap all the way across at least when they did that when they did that follow the follow the terrain i got a little bit tight so i went back out with a little hand skill saw and actually cut you know anywhere from half an inch to an inch off the bottom of some of these rails but let me show you how i set this up because the posts i didn't want the post behind the fence i wanted the post in front of the fence to give it some depth to give it some architectural structure so let me show you what i did normally this post this post would actually be on the inside of the fence but it but what i wanted to do was i actually wanted to have this on the outside of the fence to give a little bit of depth to it see what i mean about how it gives a little bit of depth here i just think it looks a lot nicer where you have this actual post actually sticking out now you can see you can see the depth how it varies a little bit at the bottom and of course i went along and cut a little bit of these off one nail right here is all we're doing and then these are the caps that we bought and there's just little brads that are holding them on now uh we did put in two gates and i want to show you the gates because the first gate is a small gate which we just did with hinges the second gate kurt does something cool he actually cuts and welds a metal frame for the larger gates and it's actually pretty cool so let me show you those so here's the first gate and this is just standard sort of 36 inch wide gate here and what we're going to do is we're eventually going to put in a brick walkway that comes across here up here let me show you the larger gate that's down here hey look at that grass that's not great look at that grain shocker is all i'm feeding that right now just green shocker nothing else get some green chocolate so here is the larger gate in case i want to pull in yard equipment a boat or whatever we have and you can see what he does is he actually builds a metal frame and attaches the wood to a metal frame it's actually pretty cool how he does that and then in the middle we have this system here pretty cool well let me take you down and show you give you an example where was it so at the bottom here you can see i've got a bigger gap down here and then in here i came and cut some of these by hand with a little skill saw just to leave a little gap so this is kirk my fence guys hi kurt hi so what we're going to do if i'm not mistaken come this way we're going to be sitting four four by four posts and then you're going to be taking this wood and you're actually going to be cutting pickets correct yep so he'll actually be custom cutting the pickets okay so two by four crosses and then this will all be pickets and pickets and four by four post 36 inches and we're gonna do caps on top of the post and uh that's about it so we're gonna get started and he gets to work in the rain and i get to go inside kurt remembers well the 18 by 24 inch holes we had to dig out back don't you so all we're doing is we're just digging just small just set some uh quick creek don't want anything major they're full-sized posts and we're going to cut them down then we're going to cap them the pickets will be 36 inches tall but the bottom will have a gap of about two inches for a weed eater to go under it and so it's post day so it is picket fence day and today all the posts are going in even though it's raining we're getting them in [Applause] so here's what we're doing we're actually right now we're back here and we're cutting all this one by four into regular sections and then where's that angled piece and then this is what we're actually doing we're cutting a little picket on the top that'll go along the fence and all good to go [Applause] [Music] so i completely screwed up everyone's day here by making a change stop laughing by making a change here at the last minute and cutting an additional two inches off the pickets my fault but uh i'll wait till he cuts but we just want to really make sure that we're within the city code i don't want to be 36 and a quarter i want to be 35 and a half inches on this fence and i want to have a nice gap at the bottom so we're cutting the pickets a little bit shorter and that's how the news i broke to him this morning so he hates my guts right there is over there putting the two by four rails on the fence before we cut them down and then the pickets will get attached to the two by four rails these are the caps for the fence well these are actually in stock at lowe's usually that's where he gets them they're just nice little uh caps for the fact after we we're gonna let the fence dry down to a certain moisture percentage for a couple weeks and then we're gonna stain it with a white solid stain and then what i'm going to do is i found for the base of the posts they make these post protectors steel post protectors that you can screw on so when you're weed eating you don't mess up your post so i'm going to get those too so let's talk about the picket spacing for a minute basically you can see that two is the board for the spacing in between so you've got a three and a half inch picket here a three and a half inch space another three and a half inch picket he was just holding them up and just spacing them just like that now when you get to the end you can either adjust those boards and sort of make the space equally or just go ahead and just have not an even you can see like right here at that post they're not evenly spaced they're actually close in and quite honestly it doesn't look that bad so most of the boards are at three and a half there are a few gaps or a little bit wider but they can adjust it now i will tell you too at this last phone so this last section right here actually it was it was really slanted if you follow the true terrain so what i did was i had them actually bring it up so this one is not following the terrain so much because it looked kind of stupid it was way too far down so we actually brought it up so you can play with that adjustment as well too oh man so the next video i'll probably be making is uh i'll probably when they come up i'll go ahead and show you the staining process and how we're actually finishing this but i got to tell you if you guys don't have green chalk or this is the fall we don't want to be putting out long-term fertilizers i am so happy with what green chalker has done to this new lawn that's all i'm doing every week i am coming out putting out a bag rate application of green shocker on this and when the temperatures finally start to go cold and this lawn stalls i'll stop i'll also show you the progress on the back a new overseed i just did which is a mix of fescues in kentucky it's coming up nice it's starting to germinate so i'll show it to you but i'm telling you man if you don't have green chalk or get some green chalker hit subscribe and i'll show you the staining when they get ready to stain the fence talk to you later [Music]