I recently had the need to build a fence in fast order on a budget. We had bees arriving in our backyard last week and I needed a fence to protect the beehive from my rather nutty dog that tries to kill flying objects. There were a few people who had full size sections of fence available on Craigslist but I wanted to find something closer to 4 feet tall instead of 6 feet and I have the limitation of not having a truck and thus not being able to transport assembled sections of virtually anything. In the end I found a lot of people who had pallets for free and it occurred to me that the slats on a pallet were the perfect size for a fence.
So, about 2 hours with a friend on a Saturday behind a warehouse and we were able to knock apart enough wood from pallets to fill up the Forester. This was the most difficult work of the entire project. A good crowbar helped but be warned this isn’t fun.
We use a hammer and a crowbar to pull all the old nails out of the wood… about 1/5 of the nails were straight enough to reuse. The rest had to be tossed.
We didn’t have any good 4x4s or 2x4s for the fence posts so we nailed two of the slats together to use for supports in the corners and along the longer sides of the fence. The posts were buried about 6-8 inches each… which I realize isn’t very deep but we had a lot of extra stability because we built the fence on a hill. Being on a hill we buried each fence post on about half of the fence which added significant stability.
Much of the work was done in the last hours of daylight…
I trimmed the vertical slats to try to make the fence even… more difficult considering the idea that the fence sits on a hill.
My wife and daughter did all the painting. We tried to pick a color that wouldn’t get too dirty too quickly.
For the gate I started with the side vertical pieces and attached three side supports and then the vertical slats. It made for a heavy fence but a very strong gate. About $5 in hardware for hinges and a latch and our fence was complete around 10 hours before the bees came 🙂
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