Staining the Front Fence

The weather has been really fantastic over the past several days, which prompted me and J to start a really time-consuming project: staining the wooden fence that surrounds our front yard. The previous owners of our house started to stain this fence a few years ago, but they obviously became daunted with the task and gave up. They even left an abandoned gallon and a half of wood stain the basement. Anyhow, J and I figured that we better retrieve the stain from the basement, since we want to train our clematis to climb around a stained trellis.

So, with a "now or never" attitude, J first stained the trellis. And once the project was started, I just had to keep going. J eventually had to stop, because his springtime allergies were bothering him too much. Luckily, he could watch Sam while I worked.)

I have a really, really hard time walking away from an unfinished project. It took us (mostly me) several days to stain the fence, and I would even wake up early (at 5:00 or 6:00 am) so I could stain for a few hours before Sam woke up. And finally, I finished everything this morning. I know it's not that exciting to look at a fence, but I'm so glad that this herculean project is done. The fence looks so much better. Now I won't be bothered by the bright-orange color of the wooden posts.

Staining this fence entailed:
- ~25 hours of manual labor
- 11.5 gallons of wood stain
- Two sunburned arms
- Countless sore muscles

In the middle of the project. You can get a sense of how the originally fence appeared.

The finished project! 

 The south side of our house. The previous owners had only stained some trim and the small part of the fence that is in the left-hand side of this shot.

The driveway looks so much better! 

You can see in this shot that I only stained the fence for the front yard. Our backyard also has a high fence on both sides, but we'll attack that project another time. Luckily, the backyard fence is considerably older and didn't look as obnoxious as the front yard fence (before it was stained, of course).

Here is our stained trellis (and the clematis which started this whole project!)