Do It Yourself Pool Fence: Setting Your Posts

As if having a pool put isn't expensive enough but then you have to pay to have a fence put around it, and that also costs money. This is why if you are like so many homeowners today, you're thinking of saving money by doing the fence installation yourself. The big challenge you face though, is having your finished work come out looking like a professional job.

So the first thing you need to do to make it easy on yourself by choosing an easy style of fence to build, and perhaps the easiest is your standard cedar slat fence. You see them all over where you live. Made from standard cedar 1 x 6 dog eared planks, nailed to a 2 x 4 frame built onto 4 x 4 posts. Sometimes they're painted but most of the time they're just left as they are for a natural wood grained look.

So you need to start out by simplifying the picture in your head. That is that you should basically put any thoughts of the finished fence on the back burner, so to speak, and just think about the framework of the fence you're about to build. Build a nice frame then you can build a nice fence on top of it. Now this type of fence frame starts out with 4 x 4 posts, and to be sure you don't come up short, buy 10 footers. You can cut the excess off the tops.

Then one huge mistake that you don't want to make before you even get started is to plot out your fence lines outside of your property boundary. Think it's hard to do? Well you're wrong because it happens quite frequently. Now there may be some type of survey markers but people have been known to move them and that's where a lot of the problems come from. So take a trip down to your county land records office of you have any questions.

So now that you have your boundary lines identified and your fence lines mapped out, it's time to drive a large stake into the ground at each identified fence corner. Then after that's been done you need to run a string from stake to stake to delineate your actual fence. Where it's going to go. Then after that has been completed, you need to use a felt tipped pen and a tape measure to mark out every 8 feet on your strings. That's where the posts are to be set.

Simply pound a small stake into the ground below each mark on the stings. Those small stakes are your reference markers for digging "nice & roomy" 2 foot deep holes for your posts. After that task has been done, simply drop the posts into their holes with a generous amount of cement, plumb them up with a level, brace them off, and allow the cement to cure for about a day before you start in building your framework.


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