Sometimes a fence is more than just a fence. When I built our house back in 1992, I needed something to help “enclose” the small space created when I pushed the garage back about 15 feet from the front of the house. With an entry to the kitchen placed in-between and room for a small patio on either side of the driveway, the result was a modest “courtyard” that begged to be enclosed by a fence of some sort.
I eventually settled on a white picket fence, which runs only about 8 feet on either side of the driveway, connecting to the house at one side and ending at the property line on the other, then turning back along the boundary there for about 15 feet before ending even-up with the front of the garage. The result was a nice, semi enclosed space, where I could keep a table and chairs on one side and storage/waste bins on the other, all hidden behind a 3 foot fence.
To frame it all off properly, I asked the fence contractor to include some large gate posts on either side of the driveway; something about five feet high and reasonably substantial—about 8” to 12” square. I may have given him a rough sketch, but the design he came up with was almost exactly what I was looking for.
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| Here you can see the way the fence was designed to wrap around the house and tie it into the landscape. |
Before he had started on the project, I had looked at the plans and decided that all of this going on at one side of the house needed to be balanced by something on the other side. As a result, I added an 8 foot length of fence (and a gate post that matched those on the other side) on the opposite side of the house; this also turned at the property line and went back about 24 feet along the boundary, enclosing a small part of the yard surrounding our enclosed porch/garden room. Eventually, this area hidden behind the fence would become known to our children as The Secret Garden.
