Up with the alarm this morning for our first days paid work in, well in about a year. Dad was here at the house painting so he said Davies and Scarlett could stay with him for the morning rather than come along with us to Mike & Rose’s (the Not Swingers).
We arrived just after 9am and Mike made us a cup of tea and then scurried back in the house. He came out several times and looked at us rather in awe of our hammering (which was most amusing given our utter ineptitude) but I strongly suspect Mike doesn’t even own a paintbrush or screwdriver. He does have some lovely suits though.
The task at hand was removing and replacing 3 smaller panels atop the garden wall on one side of the garden, including re-siting the end one to a higher position. Removing 3 larger panels and a gate on the other side of the garden. We’d eyeballed the smaller ones as 6 x 3 panels and the larger as 6 x6 panels although we realised one of the larger ones was not quite 6 foot wide and we’d need to cut down a 6ft panel to make it fit. Ady had taken advice from Dad on this and knew how to do it (put batten along where it needs cutting, cut along the side of the batten). The existing gate was only 5ft high and Rose wanted it replaced with a 6ft gate.
The gear had all arrived last night and was waiting for us when we arrived. We decided the first job was to remove the smaller panels so took them all down. This was the point I friendfeeded about feeling like one of the Chuckle Brothers. Ady is classic Frank Spencer with tools, always treading on the rake, misplacing the hammer and sawing off the branch he’s sitting on cartoon character stylee. We had to clamber on garden chairs (brittle from frost), behind bushes and chop down a honeysuckle which was holding up the middle panel. That done we managed to drop a fence clip into the neighbours garden and both peered over the wall at it, Chuckle Brothers-esque and realised in trying to reach it we would likely cause more damage or drop something else so shrugged and left it there.
We then struggled to bring in the 6×3 panels, pretty heavy as they are new and were cold and wet. Having huffed and puffed and tripped and slipped on tools and a wet lawn Ady looked at them leant up against the taken down panels and observed that the one’s we’d taken down were not 6×3 at all, but 6×4.
😯 😯 😯
And UU
A plan was swifly hatched for Ady to drive home, get Dad to come back up with his van and take me and the wrong panels to the shop to swap them over for the right panels.
I continued removing the other side panels which were very rotten and mostly came down easily although the brackets took a lot of getting off and I kept getting tangled in a rose bush trailed on some trellis.
Dad appeared, most entertained by the whole business. He does a fair bit of fencing work and had been jokily indignant about us ‘taking food from his mouth’ by doing this job. I greeted him with the words ‘first rule of fencing? Use a fucking tape measure!’ thinking if I didn’t say it first he surely would 😆
We loaded them onto his roof rack – both of us sadly surprised by the unspoken but rather obvious realisation that I was far more able to lift and carry than he was. I suppose at 38 and 74 that is the right way round but still a bit of a wake up call to us both that I am at my fittest and he is declining from his peak.
The bloke in the shop was equally amused by the error and I took further ribbing from both of them before we got the correct size panels and loaded them on the roof rack and took them back up. Dad then left and Ady returned.
On the plus side Ady got to listen to Popmaster back at home while I got to listen to it with Dad in his van. Every cloud…
Ady and I then got the 6×4 panels all up, they look good and despite a challenging aspect to the end on which didn’t have a post to attach to so we used some batten and the wall they are all stable and sturdy and straight 🙂
I whizzed back with the intention of collecting the kids and some lunch for Ady and I but Dad offered to take them back to his house with him for the afternoon which was a far better plan so I gratefully accepted, made him a drink and some lunch, some sandwiches for the kids, some for me and Ady and went back to carry on.
We were almost smug at this point – potential disaster abated, half the job done, childfree afternoon…
Then we laid the first 6×6 panel up against the prepared posts and brackets and realised that it didn’t fit. By about 6 inches. Turns out that only one of the three 6×6 panels was actually 6×6 – the other two were both butchered versions thereof. We’d known about one but judged the other to be a full size one.
So came operation fence panel trim. We took some battens off one of the panels we’d removed, sawed them to length, removed some nails from old panels and banged the new battens on (narrowly avoiding putting the batten through the next door neighbours bathroom window and with much losing of hammers). It more or less fitted ;). With some hammering and kicking and sawing a little bit more off and plenty of swearing it was installed.
Then the one single straightforward correctly sized panel. Complete with gravel board (which I’d heard of before but didn’t actually know what one was until today) from the old panel, slightly rotten but already cut to shape and mostly hidden by the nice new panel. Third and final panel went in with cutting down, Ady nearly garrotting the dog who had come out without him realising and got bashed by the batten as Ady snatched it from me and called me an idiot for not having cut it down. I laughed so much I got hiccups. And had to hide while I composed myself as Mike came out to offer another cup of tea.
Finally the gate. Ady finished banging in extra nails in places while I started taking the hinges off the old gate before deciding that maybe we should just check one more time that the new one was the right size. You already know the answer….
We’d measured it at 5×3. It was infact 5×2.10 1/2.
At which point I screwed the hinges back on and started tidying up instead.
Rose returned home and we gave her the options; we cut the new gate down to fit. We take it back and see how much a made to measure gate would cost, we move the posts it sits between to accommodate the new gate.
We decided to go for option 3 so tomorrow we’re back, ready to get the gate sorted. Dad is coming up with us to look at it and check our plan will work.
Overall I am pleased with what we did. I learnt a lot from today. About measuring. About never assuming a first glance at a workload is accurate, about knowing precisely what tools and gear are required. That for jobs like this one screws may take longer to put in but are preferable to nails if there is any chance at all you may be removing them and putting them back in again.
I was proud of us though. We did it, we sorted out the problems, made a good job of it, had the right ideas to get past some of the problems and above all laughed lots and lots :).