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Repair Your Wooden Picket Fence

 

Wood picket fences used to be far more common than they are today, especially since the style is decidedly Victorian and so more aligns with that of architecture dating to the late 1800's and early 1900's. The picket fence is often used decoratively or to denote boundaries, such as a property marker or to bound a garden or flower bed.

 

A responsibility that comes with owning a wood fence of any kind is maintenance. The more frequent the maintenance you provide, the longer the fence will last before requiring complete replacement. Maintenance isn't necessarily difficult, but it can be laborious and time-consuming and require some basic do-it-yourselfer skills. This is not a detailed how-to guide to picket fence maintenance, rather, a high-level explanation of what you might consider doing every few years to keep your picket fence well-maintained:

 

1) Inspect the fence, picket-by-picket, post-by-post, rail-by-rail (the upper and lower horizontal beams between the posts holding the pickets on). Look for loose pieces, which often denote wood rot or fastener failure. These are the pieces that will require attention, be it replacement or repair.

 

2) If you find wood rot during inspection, you'll need to decide if the rot is isolated and is worth fixing to save the fence, or if the rot is epidemic to the whole fence suggesting it may be more cost-effective to replace the entire fence.

 

3) Assuming you'll be making repairs, it's typically best to replace structural pieces first if you identified rot in those pieces. These are the foundation of your fence and will be the most labor-intensive to replace but they are also the pieces that hold everything else together, so start here. The structural pieces are the posts and rails. If you are lucky enough to find matching wood parts at a home store, you are ahead of the game - if not, you'll need to use the old pieces as a pattern to duplicate them.

 

4) Once all necessary structural pieces are replaced or repaired, then do any necessary replacements to rotted or damaged pickets. It's very likely you'll need to use an old picket as a pattern to duplicate it since you won't find individual replacement pickets at a home store these days.

 

5) Lastly, once all repairs have been made, you'll want to protect the fence by applying new paint to seal out the weather. Your biggest payback for your time when painting is proper preparation - clean and prep the fence surface for paint properly and the paint will last literally years longer than a poorly prepared surface. My pro-tip for surface preparation is a pressure washer, but be VERY careful and check the water pressure to assure you aren't going to cut up the wood. My pressure washer is a 4000psi unit that can be used on concrete and so when using it on wood surfaces I have to dial it as far down as it will go or I'll cut wood to shreds. The advantage is that pressure washing is a great way to prepare for painting since it removes mold, loose paint, and dirt and you do it very quickly compared to scraping and sanding which can take days for a long fence.

 

6) Apply a new high-quality coat of exterior paint. Painting with a roller and brush takes a lot of time, but the advantage is you are mechanically forcing paint into cracks and crevices which might add longevity to your paint job. The alternative is to use a paint sprayer, which is very quick but might not find those cracks and crevices as well. I would recommend using a roller and brush for smaller projects and leave the sprayer option if you have a lot of area to cover. I suggest doing a quality single coat of paint and then go back over it to do any spot-painting for areas that might need touching-up.

 

 

I would write a conclusion here but all that entails is recycling everything I've already outlined above or inserting some feel-good phrase like “Sit back and enjoy the fruits of your labor - your exquisitely restored picket fence!” I could write stuff like that, but I won't. Instead, I'll congratulate you for taking the incentive to tackle such a restoration project because it can be a deceptively big undertaking to maintain a wood fence, particularly if it has been left neglected for too long. If you need help with such a project, don't hesitate to reach out to Tuxedo Home Maintenance for a free estimate!