White Picket Fence - The garden home challenge with p. allen smith

The American dream: a house, a garage, a car, two and a half kids, a dog, and, of course, a white picket fence. They say an eco-friendly house can't be built in 150 days for $150,000, and I say it can. I'm Allen Smith, join me as I push the limits with time, budget and creativity with the Garden Home Challenge, exclusively on eHow Home. You know, there's just something about creating a sense of enclosure even with a little cottage out here in the country. Maybe even more so. It keeps varmints out. This is really more for looks. It just adds such a charm factor. So, look at the these pickets across the front: What we did is we took a 1x4 board and split it down the middle, and then did this notched top on it. You can see right here, we just -- a little triangulation, with a just little bit of, not too sharp of a point. And these pickets are actually 3 feet tall. And just under them, well, there's a gap of 2 1/2 inches down there. So you go: How do you come up with that number, this height? Well, it feels good from here. But you have to understand this house was built on a slope, and you have a very busy farm road here in front. So in order to give some privacy, what I wanted to do was to create a wall, if you will. In this case, a brick base and a picket fence. And we are actually 3 feet, almost 3 1/2 feet, above the level of the house itself, up here. So we had to cut down and level this courtyard area. And now what I'm doing is I'm finishing it off with this picket fence. Now the height, let's go back to that for just a minute because it's very important. Because for me, as a designer, it's all about the view. So let's go over here on the front porch and I'll show you what I mean. So you see, it's really all about what you see from here. Now, eventually, I'm not gonna be seeing all this equipment. But the view, the borrowed view, that's what so important here. Now you can see the road where I was standing just a moment ago, and the idea is: sitting on the front porch, you can sit here and look out across that beautiful paddock. And in the spring, it's loaded with daffodils. And you look up at those two big trees and beyond the sky, and all this big blue sky. But I wanted enough picket fence along there so that you wouldn't see the actual gravel road itself. So it was a compromise. I could've come down a little more from this perspective from where I'm sitting here on the porch. But if I had done that, it would've been a really tiny fence across the front, and that would've looked small. So, 3 feet for the picket was what I decided on with 2 1/2 inches below. And then it was important to get the proportions of the posts themselves right. So why don't we take a look at those. So just now, the posts are being braced, well, at least these two posts here. Because what will happen, there's gonna be a handrail that will come to this post, but the mud is setting up around it. But let's go back to the proportions of these posts: What I wanted to do here on the corner post or the main post was use a 5 inch treated post -- these treated posts will last up to 50, 40 to 50 years. And then use treated lumber all the way along here along this rail, back to a 5 foot post here. And then this middle post is a smaller post which is only 3 1/2 inches. We used 2x4s on the top and bottom rail, and they're cut on a slight bevel to shed water, which hopefully will add longevity to their existence out here. Now, whether it's raining or not, we just keep pushing along. It's actually a great day to be working. If you're enjoying these updates on how our landscape project is coming along, make sure you subscribe to eHow Home. And tell a friend about it.