Researching for Historical Accuracy - picket fences

Historical Accuracy is very important to me in restoring my house. So when JC posted a comment about my picket fence being historically accurate I decided to make a post on the research I did before building my fence.

Over the years I've seen numerous old house photos and one one of the things I noticed was that most houses that had picket fences used 1x1 square pickets instead of board pickets.

Here is a picture of a house here in Woodbury that was taken in 1908. At the right of the picture is a square picket fence.

 1908, Woodbury, Ga

Another thing I noticed was that a lot of these fences had alternating height pickets. I wanted to do something that would stand out a little so this seemed perfect.

Here are some pictures of alternating height square picket fences that I found while doing my research.

 Undated, Bryan Co, Ga

 1914, Columbia Co, Ga

 1905, Decatur Co, Ga

 1890, Dekalb Co, Ga

 1909, Emanuel Co, Ga

 Undated, Franklin Co, Ga

 1898, Hancock Co, Ga

 1895, Montgomery Co, Ga

1870-1899, Schley Co, Ga

Every one of the pictures above has the alternating height, square pickets. Also, all the pictures are in the same time-frame of my house.

The one major difference in these fences and mine is the board that runs along the bottom in all of the others. I may add this board to my fence, I haven't decided yet.

Picket Fence

What started out as a quick trim-up of the bushes turned into a huge project.

The hedge I was trimming is the Boxwood hedge on the north side of the house, it has gotten extremely overgrown. Not to mention the 18' Oak trees growing up through them. I was holding back on cutting them down because they were great trees and was hoping someone would want them.

In the end I couldn't find anyone that wanted them so I started trimming the hedge with the intention of taking all the trees down. Once again I forgot to take a before picture but here is an in progress one.

The area inside the hedge is a small garden with Azaleas, Nandinas, and Camellias. It is also overgrown with weeds, small treess, and poison ivy everywhere. I cleared this area out once back in 2008, you can see what it looked like then here.

As I worked on it my wife and I got to talking about a picket fence for the front yard. we've talked about one before but never followed through. This time we decided to go price out the wood. After pricing the wood we decided to go ahead and do it.

The first step was to layout the fence line, I used chicken wire fence stakes and string. Then I spray painted a dot every 6 feet along the line for fence posts.

Next came the fun part, digging 45 fence post holes by hand. With the holes dug I installed the posts and concreted them in making sure they were perfectly level all the way around and in a perfectly straight line.

Next came the cross pieces and then finally the pickets. I had to make a jig for my miter saw to cut the points on all the pickets, all 500 of them. In the picture below you can see the jig with a fence picket in it ready to be cut. I ended up doing 2 at a time which sped up the process. I used the same jig in a different position to cut down half of the posts 2" since the fence will have alternating height pickets.

I created a picket with blocks on to get the proper spacing between pickets. For the first fence section I had to lay the pickets out in front of the fence to get the proper spacing. Once I knew how many pickets would fit in a given amount of space I used that to figure out how far in to start the first picket on each section.

In the above picture you can see my spacer picket, I clamped it in place so my hands were free to screw the next picket into place. In the subsequent sections I also clamped a 2x4 to the bottom board to get the bottom of the pickets at the correct height easily.

The fence has 3 gates, a double gate at the front and one on either side near the back of the fence.

 Front gates

 North side gate

South side gate

Anyone see anything wrong with the two side gates?

The north side gate goes to the neighbors yard, which just so happens to be my mother. The south side gate goes to the driveway, there is a drop-off here so I will build a couple of brick steps here.

Once I finished the fence I got back to work on the hedge and removed all the weeds, trees, and sprayed the poison ivy.

Here are some pictures of the completed fence (and boxwood hedge).

The corner posts and the side gate posts have decorative caps on them, the main gate posts have decorative caps with a ball on top, and the rest of the posts are beveled at the top.

The jury is still out on whether to paint the fence white or just use a sealer on it. I think painting it white (our trim color on the house) would look the best but I'm not looking forward to the upkeep.

Here's a before and after of the north side of the house and yard. The before was taken in Sep 2007 a few months before we bought the house.

Parlor Redo

We ended up selling our Parlor furniture and moving the Living room furniture in here because we turned the Living room into a Bedroom in preparation for the new baby.

Here are a few Parlor pics.

Our New Baby II

On April 7th we welcomed our second child, Lachlan Garrett, into the world.

I have done a lot of work on the house but I need to finish up a few more things before it's post-worthy.

The Parlor

We decided to paint over the wallpaper in the parlor. You may remember about a year and a half ago I was trying to scrub the wallpaper. It cleaned up ok but it was still discolored.

It doesnt look so bad in the picture but in person it wasn't good. So we decided to go ahead and paint over it. In the end I'm glad we decided to do it. You can still see the wallpaper pattern through the paint and the color is what the wallpaper would have looked like originally.

You cant see the wallpaper pattern in the pictures but you can see it in person.

You can see the one area I didn't paint behind the curtain. I still need to go back and paint that.

You may also notice that the fireplace mantle is different than what was originally here. We found this mantle in an antique shop and it turns out it came from an old victorian house in Fayetteville that I used to drive by every day. It was destroyed in a tornado about 6 years ago.

The mantle has many layers of paint on it, so many that much of the detail is obscured. I will eventually have the mantle dipped to remove it all but for now I put two coats of trim paint on it to clean it up.

I'm also going to be replacing the surround and hearth eventually. I had mentioned in a previous post about how the fake brick surround and hearth tiles were installed in the 40's, and that I had found the original hearth tiles underneath the brick tiles.

AUTGA5GMTKMU

Dining Room / Kitchen Doorway

Another project I completed is the doorway between the dining room and the kitchen. This is what it looked like before:

The first thing I did was to make and install the threshold. The kitchen floor is about 2" higher than the dining room floor because of all the leveling I had to do in the kitchen.

I used a piece of 5 1/4" oak flooring for the threshold, I cut both ends of the board at angles because the threshold will lay at an angle.

Once it was cut I cut and installed a shim piece to go below the threshold:

Then I installed the threshold:

With that done I installed the door casing. I found some casing that is very similar to the original casing in the house.

The casing is about an inch smaller than the original, I didn't have any rosettes that matched so I cut some blocks out of the oak flooring.

Once I have new casing cut to match the originals I will re-frame this doorway.

Main Bathroom Update

The main bathroom is another project that I have been working on. Last week I finished cutting in the primer on the walls, then I scraped all the trim.

One of the neat things I found here was the old exterior trim color, it's the brown/olive looking color on the door casing. This room used to be a side porch. I know this was an exterior color because when they closed the porch in and hung the interior door they just slapped the hinges up on the casing, you can see where they were on the casing on the right. That color was directly underneath.

Once the scraping was done I primered and painted all the trim, then painted the walls.

Sorry for the pics, it's very hard to get decent shots in this room.

Left to do still is install 1/4 round and baseboards, caulk, and paint the ceiling.

Finishing up the Side Hall

I've spent the last few weeks working on the house. The side hall was the first project I worked on.

Back in October of last year I laid the new oak flooring in the side hall but I never finished the last row.

It only took about an hour to install the final row of flooring, but last year I spent two sixteen hour days on it and by the time I got to the last row, which I had to rip down to the right size, I was just too tired to finish.

With the floor finally finished I turned to the chair rail. I was originally going to have some made for me but once I looked closely at the profile I realized that I had a router bit that could do it in two passes.

It's an almost perfect match to the original. Next I finished the sheetrock above the chair rail.

The trim that makes the bottom part of the chair rail will have to be made, I cant do it and there is nothing even close at the store.


Here are a few pics of the side hall now.

Left to do still is the trim for the bottom of the chair rail, picture rail, and crown. Oh, and replicate a leg for the Empire dresser...