Posting

Sometime around the first official day of summer, during the very height of fire season here in the northern front range of Colorado, my neighbor's son-in-law got back to me about my proposal to replace the fence we share with his mother-in-law. The timing couldn't have been worse but he gamely pointed out that the following Saturday would be the last 'Free Drop-off' of the year for our municipal trash service and were we to commit to removing the old fence right away, we could potentially save a fair chunk of money. I sighed and conferred with Kimberly.

Flash forward to August. Somewhere between the extended hours at work due to severe fire conditions and a brief assignment on the Waldo Canyon fire, I managed to get all of the posts for the fence put in place. The apparent beefiness of the posts is partly an accurate reflection of reality, partly an illusion of perspective. The two posts in the fore are 6x6 while the rest are 4x6 with the wider dimension facing the camera. The 6x6s will have gates hanging from them whereas the others will merely be holding up 6 foot by 8 foot panels that will have to somehow buck the winter Chinook winds (90mph+).

Over the course of my post-placing adventure, I have decided that I learned the following:
0. Make sure you have a post-level and a string-line-level (non-traditional tools). Also some duplex nails.
1. Find out how much the grade changes from one end of the fence to the other BEFORE designing and committing to a particular shopping list. If the order has already been placed and say you wanted a 6 foot tall privacy fence along a line which drops 6 inches from one end to the other, plan on having a 6 foot fence at the lowest end and a 5'6" tall fence at the highest. Or maybe step it if you can stand such a thing. 2. Put up the end posts first.
3. If using tube-forms, which I like, then only use them for the top 1 foot or so of the pour. There is no real reason for tube-forms beyond esthetic and there is no real need for esthetic several feet below grade.
4. Try to keep the diameter of the hole below the tube-form to within a couple inches of the diameter of the tube-form, but definitely bigger.
5. Plan to have the buried part of the post be equivalent to 1/3 of the exposed part of the post.
6. Dig AT LEAST 6 inches lower.
7. Determine which faces of the post will be on the 'outsides' and scribe a line across the center of the top that runs the direction you want the fence to run. 8. Take a pair of 2x2s or 2x4s which are at least 2' long and cut the ends at 45 degrees. Drill a hole at the other ends which is the same diameter (or a little bigger) that that of your duplex nails.
9. Use gravel to fill the bottom of the hole to bring the top of the post up to the right level. Gravel is wonderful in that it compacts quickly, drains well and a post can be 'lowered' a little bit if there is too much gravel by screwing it back and forth.
10. With the post-level in place, maneuver the post until it is level on the x & y axis with the mid-line scribed line along the line you want the fence to run.
11. BEFORE putting the braces in place, make sure the tube-form has been put in place. It isn't a bad idea to use a couple short pieces of 2x4 and a couple 1/2" screws to hold the form where you want it and level. Plus it makes it a lot easier to ensure that the top of the form remains at about an inch above it's adjacent grade.
12. Hammer the braces onto one of the east/west faces of the post and one of the north/south.
13. Push the post away from the tips of the braces just a bit so that their tips are just past where you want them then bring the post back to true, driving the braces in place to do so. This should lock the post to true.

14. I just so happened to have a bunch of chain link fence laying around doing nothing so I cut a strand free, cut it to the approximate depth of the buried part of the post, and laid the 4 pieces in the hole before pouring. This is probably COMPLETELY unnecessary but hey, I have a bunch of chain link fence laying around. Why not make a poor man's rebar?
15. Concrete and shovel it in. I've discovered that a short D-handle shovel is my favorite tool for mixing concrete, probably because it functions so similarly to a canoe paddle and a J stroke seems to be a great way to un-earth hidden pockets of dry mix. Also, one 80lbs bag of quikrete seems to reach about the perfect consistency with 4.5 quarts of water.
16. Stop shoveling and confirm everything is true after the first couple scoops.
17. The best trowel to use to round the tops of a tube-form is a simple garden trowel.
18. After getting up the end posts, stretch a line between them which draws over their mid-line across their tops.
19. Use a plumb-bob of some sort to determine the center for all subsequent holes, commit to a couple inches to create a definitive start, then use the plumb bob to re-confirm. (Adjusting holes is no fun at all, at either end of the process.)
20. Repeat 3 thru 17.