New Fence Install, Day 1: Arguments and Angles

June 28, 2025

What typically happens for me and Liz, when we tackle a complex project together – we tend to argue. We both have very strong opinions around implementation details, and we tend to disagree about how to go about certain tasks.

We’ve learned that it’s helpful for us to talk through these differences, before rolling up our sleeves to begin the work. But there’s a push/pull: I tend to want to talk things to death first, and Liz tends to want to dive in and “figure it out” as we’re in the thick of it.

This morning, as we embarked on starting to do the actual fence install… we got into it a lot. And there was a great deal of back and forth.

That said, I think at the end of the day we landed on a good place. And got some good work in, on our first day.

A large part of our morning was receiving the delivery from Menards, and then relocating everything from the end of the driveway down near the backyard.

I really wish we could have asked for a later delivery time (the truck showed up around 7:30 AM on a Saturday). I hate disturbing our neighbors so early on a weekend, but this was the time alloted to us… and there was no good way around it.

Our focus today: the top rail. This first board is… a little weird. We wanted to have it run parallel to our deck. For the most part, a pretty straightforward cut and install.

As we progressed down the yard, we had to account for a gradual angle that rose more and more.

We thought our posts were good, but realized halfway through the process that our stringline was caught on a branch… and all our posts were off by an inch or so.

To get around this, our top rails aren’t flush to the top of the metal posts… and instead, are gradually angling upwards.

I was tearing my hair out trying to figure out how to figure out these angles. But Liz had a really great solution: we’d clamp the full boards (2x4x8) against the posts, and then trace where they hit the metal posts.

In this way, we could get pretty accurate angled cuts, without having to do any math. It worked like a charm, and we were able to get things positioned with very little number crunching.