Because my mental being can’t handle loose ends, I decided to take it upon myself to put back up my own fucking fence, so that it’s one less thing that I’ll have to dump money into when it comes time to (hopefully) finding someone competent to fix shit around my house. As mentioned before, in the process, I fucked up my finger pretty bad, but fortunately it wasn’t in a state where I couldn’t just bandage it up, wear gloves and not be able to continue working.
To summarize, among the shit that the clown of a “handyman” I “hired” to fix my window did, was not just remove several fence panels, but also damage the posts in in the process of fishing the $450 scissor lift rental I made on his request, off of my backyard, which also tore the shit out of my turf (photos below). He claimed that he would take responsibility for the damages, but shocking nobody, he’s been as evasive and vague as an extreme cheapskate when the bill shows up, about when he’s actually coming to do anything, and frankly I don’t actually believe he’s going to do anything, and I’m going to light him up on the internet and hope it hurts his future business, because an asshole like this doesn’t need to be out there pretending to be a respectable handyman.
During the days of ghosting, I would step outside and just look at the unfinished job of the fence, and get madder and madder, and I realized that this was not good for my mental state. Just because I didn’t want to do it didn’t mean that I wasn’t capable of doing it, and considering the sloppy nature of this guy in the first place, it would probably be in the best interest if I did it myself, to ensure that it would be done well.
So janky finger injury aside, I assessed where things stood, and came to the conclusion that this was one of those situations where I would just have to do this shit myself.
So the first image in this row, is how the clown left things, the last time he was here. He removed the posts that he fucked up, and placed two new posts, but then cited needing the concrete to set first, so he could finish later AKA go to another job that was actually going to pay money, and send my project to the back of the fucking bus.
If you can tell, you might notice that the untreated post on the left and the untreated post on the right have vastly different heights, regardless of the angled perspective. Ultimately, the height of the posts needed to be 6’ high after being set into the ground, but what this clown clearly did was pre-cut the post on the left before planting it, realizing how much he fucked up, and then not pre-cutting the one on the right before planting it. So what we have are two retarded height posts in the end, and the green markings on the right were the marks that I made, to micromanage the asshole of where to cut because at this point, I didn’t trust him to actually do good work.
Second image details the cut that I made myself, after I took control of the wheel and started doing the work.
The third image is my solution to the shortened post; yes, it’s a little ghetto, but I really had no choice, since I can’t exactly yank and pull up a concrete-embedded post from the ground and expect it to retain its height. So I added it back, using the discarded cut of the post, and more or less screwing it back onto the rest of the post to gain the necessary height back. As unsightly as it looks in this photo, my hopes were that once painted and mixed in with the rest of the fence, it won’t be as prevalent to anyone who doesn’t know it’s there.
And the fourth image is of the finished post, complete with the beveling I did myself.
First image in this row, are the finished posts, height adjusted, beveled and stained. For what I had to work with, I didn’t think they were that bad off, if I say so myself. I know about the janky post fix, so that’ll always drive me nuts, but I’m hoping people who don’t know, won’t ever be aware of it.
Now the second image, shocking nobody, the clown handyman basically eyeballed the insertion of the new posts, and didn’t really take any effort to level or make sure that the positioning were 100% accurate. That being said, it was overall close, but my fence was initially installed by professionals who did it with precision; so a slight deviation is all it takes for something to not line up correctly and fit like it should. In order for me to get the fence panel to line back up to the new post, I had to shave about a quarter of an inch off of one of the pickets, and ultimately slice off a quarter of an inch off of the cross beam, so that it wouldn’t collide with the gate door. Again, I was hoping that once stained and treated, it would hide the imperfections adequately, leaving really only myself and anyone I tell who really knows that anything’s happened.
The third image is kind of a work in progress shot, that shows that I got the two fence panels up. You can see the raw edge of the cross beam on the bottom right of the panel near the lip of the bucket, where I had to saw off in order for the door to work.
The fourth image is just the other side of the fence, and you can see the raw edge better, as well as faint glimpses of the shaved off plank on the bottom left of the last plank. But overall, the crossbeams are cohesive and lined up well from their original orientation, and I’m actually surprised at how well it turned out given how much of a shitty worker the clown handyman was. Ironically, having removed everything gave me the opportunity to stain and seal a lot of spaces that didn’t get done originally, since I had just taken a power sprayer to everything, so if anything at all, the space underneath the hinges were also stained, and have a tiny bit more protection than they did before.
Obviously, the image up top is the finished gate, that I took right as the sun was beginning to set. In spite of the unfortunate journey of my fence during this ordeal, I’m satisfied with the handiwork that I did to fix someone else’s fuck up. I don’t know how dealing with this clown is going to pan out, but in the end, I’m out $450 for someone to fuck my property up, I have a jacked-up finger wound, and my mental health has been pretty taxed throughout it all. I’m hoping once all traces of the clown’s existence on my property begin to vanish, I’ll feel better, but until then, it’s put me in a pretty bad state of being.
