We went through the choices of new materials and vinyl seemed to be the best fit for us. There's no maintenance once it's installed, it's easy for the do it yourself people (me), and it looks pretty good from a few feet away.

 We could have built the fence ourselves out of wood but there's the ongoing maintenance, and aluminum fence just didn't have the look we were going for. We shopped around for the fence and saw that some had pickets that were just glued to the horizontal rails. While every one assured us that the pickets would stay fastened we weren't sure of that so we discarded those styles. The second thing that we looked at was the thickness of the outer layer. Most PVC fence is coextruded meaning there is a smooth colored outer layer and a rough inner layer. This lowers the manufacturing cost, but too thin of an outer layer could cause the fence to start looking bad after a few scratches.

The fence we chose was Chesapeake Scallop by US Fence, available by special order from Home Depot. Carefully plan your installation because the help at the pro desk there wasn't very good. I ended up ordering an extra end post and one too few line posts. This was repaired by using a rotozip to cut an extra set of slots in the end post to turn it into a line post. The fence comes unassembled from the factory, each 4'x8' section is in a box 8" x 8" x 8' long. The bottom rail has an aluminum "H" beam in it to stiffen the fence. There are 25 pickets per section, each picket was numbered making assembly a lot easier. The top rail has a small square hole and a larger rectangular slot so the fence can be racked a few degrees to keep the pickets vertical on an incline.

To assemble the fence I laid out the pickets in order, stood the bottom rail up on the garage floor, inserted the picket bottom first through the square hole in the top rail and then into bottom rail. It was easiest for me to insert the two end pickets with a helper, and then insert the middle pickets in order starting from an end. Each picket has wedge shaped catches on the bottom, it also helped to align them with the wide portion of the slot in the top rail so they didn't catch going through the slot. Assembly took about 10 minutes per panel after the first few, about 4 hours for 13 fence sections and 3 gates. This was done the weekend before the fence went up.

The next step was removing the old fence. I cheated on this and am glad that I did. I rented a Powerhouse Prowler from Home Depot. We placed a nylon choker sling around the bottom of each fence post and lifted the pole out of the ground. Once that's done you can cut the fence clips and remove the fence from the pole. The fence helped the choker to tighten around the post and made the whole job painless.

Once the old fence was removed it was pretty easy to drive stakes into the ground marking the new post locations. A 100' tape makes the job easier and more accurate during this step, and you can pick one up for under $20 if you don't already own one. The Prowler made short work of drilling the post holes. Each hole was dug to between 36" and 42" depth. Some loose dirt was left in the bottom of each hole that had to be removed with a post hole digger. We started at about 7:30 AM and by 12:30 the Prowler was washed and on its way back.

The last preparatory step was to fill each hole to 24" depth with gravel. We got a half cubic yard of gravel for $20 from a local landscape supply and had some left over. You need a pickup for this, the cost would triple buying the bagged stuff. A hand tamper was used to level the gravel and compact it. With the gravel level the post just naturally stood vertical. It was now about 4 PM and threatening rain so we called it a day.

Sunday we started at about 8:30. Before the day began I put the posts in the holes, this is when I discovered the incorrect number of line posts. I also carried out all of the fence sections, and rolled out the rented cement mixer. Other tools for this stage were 2 fence post levels and a small trowel to level the cement.

Installation starts by snapping a fence section into 2 posts and setting the posts into their holes. Mix and pour the concrete into the first hole and level the post. Leveling was easy if the gravel is level. Snap fence section 2 and post 3 onto the fence and then fill hole 2 and level post 2. Having 2 fence post levels helped. We left one on the post we'd just filled and had one on the post we were filling. There wasn't a good way to brace the fence if it didn't want to sit level, luckily all of ours did except one. It wanted to sit off to the side so I wedged a long wooden surveyor's stake between the top rail and the post and kicked it level.

Each 12" hole took 3 bags of cement and the rented mixer was a two bag mixer. That wasn't much of a problem using the procedure above though. We were done with the fence installation at about 1:00 PM for 13 sections of fence.

Hanging the gates is a job for next weekend.

Total expenses were

13 fence sections, the posts and 3 gates $1800.

Powerhouse prowler rental $250

Cement mixer rental $40

100' tape and 2 fence post levels $30

50 bags of cement ???