Scavenger Chic

Salvaging Old Fence Boards

• By Joan
• May 29, 2019
• 6 Comments

This is part of my brother’s fence surrounding his backyard.  He’s lived in his current house for 30 years and the fence was already 10 years old when he moved in. So if you’ve done the math, that’s a 40 year old fence.  He’s propped up the fence more times than he can count but it’s been slowly rotting and it either needed to be completely torn down or replaced.  The wood was too far gone to be reused, at least not as fencing.

Some time ago my brother asked if I would be interested in some of the wood if he ever got around to tearing down the fence.  I was being conservative when I told him to save me 20-30 pieces.

But now I have a project and it is time to harvest some of that beautiful rotten wood.  I’ll show you the fence project in a couple weeks if we ever finish it, right now it’a a work in process.

The wood is solid 1 inch oak hardwood. It’s never been pressure treated and today  I’m going to show you what you need to know so you can bring some questionable wood into your home clean and bug free.

I would need 60 boards at least 40″ long for the project,  and luckily my brother has a big yard.  If you got rid of the rotted ends the boards in the first picture would be too short.  Luckily he had a taller run of fencing along the back of his yard.

With a reciprocating saw  he tore out sections of his fence and brought them to me.  Similar to taking apart a pallet ,  I would take a circular saw and cut away the boards holding the fence together  at the top and bottom of the fence.  The longer fencing had a center piece of wood holding everything together and just like a pallet that had to be pried off.

All the rotten ends got taken straight to his truck for a dump run later in the day.

Where the wood is obviously rotten and weathered cut that off plus a couple inches.

How do you know if you cut far enough in?  Your wood should look like this.

If your wood looks like this, you’ll have to take a few more inches off until you see no  insect damage or wood rot.

I cut off the ends so there were no nails there but where the center piece of wood was, I still had a line of rusty nails.  Either pull the nails out or do what I’m doing and just cut them off with a grinder.  This is the way to go if you have no desire to pull out over 100 nails.

You could use a pressure washer to clean the wood but I’m just hitting those 40 years of weathering, dirt and grime with a sander.  I did like the patina on some of the boards but they were all different depending on where they sat in the yard, were they under a tree, did they get a coat of stain in their past life (the back of the fencing didn’t) and I wanted them to all be the same.

You could cut these middles off and just use the fence plank ends but I still needed the 40″ so they would have to stay.  Sand as much of the rot away as you can.

 By the way, this is a great project to do outside with a dust mask.  The rotten wood sands off like  powder.

Some of the difference in the patina is evident in those top few boards.  My bottom 2 boards are  beautiful new (aged) oak hardwood.

More bugs?  What sanding does for you, if there are any ant colonies they run for the hills once you start sanding.  They didn’t care when I sawed off the ends of the boards or the drive home or the wood stacking but once the vibration of the sander came they abandoned ship.  Of all the wood we salvaged that day this was the only hole  where ants lived.

One other thing you’re looking for are these perfectly round, tiny holes.  While they may be just a random little bug walking by and taking a chomp out of the wood, they may also signify another type of pest, powder post beetles.  If there are tons of these tiny holes, don’t use the wood.

A couple holes is hardly an infestation but I didn’t want to take any chances using the wood indoors.  Even though only a few boards had the chomp marks I’m using Tim-bor Professional Insecticide and Fungicide.  It mixes with water and you just paint it on. 

Let dry in the sun.

One way to check to see if there is anybody left munching your wood, and if you don’t need to use your wood immediately,  pile the wood outside with the bad side down (if you have a bad side) and wait 5 to 6 days or longer.  If anyone is still munching on your wood you’ll find a small pile of sawdust beneath their lunch spot. Drill a hole and treat again or just discard that piece of wood.

Last step was to add a few big globs of white trim paint to water to white wash the fence boards.  I used about 1/3 paint to 2/3 water but the consistency is up to you for how opaque you’d like the paint to be.

You’ll have to check out a later post to find where I actually used all this beautiful wood and to see if all the effort was worth it.

Stay inspired.

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