I don’t know about you, but certain kinds of basic household maintenance can seem about as uninteresting as watching beige paint dry. To keep me motivated, I sometimes offer myself little rewards. Why not make the repairs I need to make, but at the same time why not modify the original plan a little bit to keep things interesting?
The old fence
There was a back fence that we installed almost twenty years ago. At the time we were a little lazy, and the thought of some plain exterior plywood nailed to some supports sounded like an acceptable solution for an out of sight, out of mind piece of the yard. Some of the fence hadn’t fared well over the years, however, and for some of the recent weekends we’ve worked on repairs.
Panels being replaced
So we knocked out the worst of the panels and replaced them with new pressure-treated plywood. And instead of plain, unfinished panels, I thought it was time to make it look like something other than a fence that might have thrown together by a couple of twenty-somethings with a still-developing sense of how the world should look.
I consider the house and yard as a bit of a living laboratory. Why not paint the panels a color that no one in their right mind would paint them? Say, something like…black. And why not dress up the plain panels with some bands of steel that will rust to a color that’ll match some of the steel details that are starting to appear around the yard?
Black fence 1
In these photos the steel has only begun to rust. By midwinter it should be nicely browned all over.
Foliage contrasts nicely with the black fence color
I think the greens and browns of the plants show up nicely against the new background instead of retreating into it. And even if it’s not exactly the color you would have painted it, the fence at least doesn’t look like it’s about to fall down…
October 11 2008 | Categories: gardening • landscape design • my garden • rambles | Tags: fences • hardscape • maintenance • plywood | 2 Comments »
