One of the first projects we needed to tackle was the fence surrounding the pool.
The pool originally had a chicken wire fence around it. It wouldn’t be safe to keep Ollie and Violet contained as our home resides on a busy road. If we wanted other parents to bring their children (and even pets!) then we wanted to find something much safer to use.
Because of the pandemic, wood pricing has also skyrocketed.
We realized that going with a vinyl fence would end up being a similar price point for us. We were very surprised!
That’s when I discovered Wam Bam Fence online!
We found Wam Bam Fence during a vinyl fence google search. Wam Bam Fence promotes their fence as a no-dig concept, which seemed kind of crazy at first. Instead of using concrete, Wam Bam fencing is built upon using long metal posts that get hammered into the ground which are then covered by the vinyl post itself.
It states that it has a wind rating equal to a category 1 hurricane! 70mph winds are pretty rare but that was the kind of wine rating we needed for this property.
Now that we’ve had the fence up for a few months, we are happy to state that this fence isn’t going anywhere anymore than a traditional concrete fence post would. Our property has had some pretty windy days!
This project should roughly take one to two days for 200′ of fence.
We installed this during our peak busy season at work instead. We were impatient about getting rid of the chicken wire fence! It took a lot of long evenings instead!
We wanted to have two double gates, which were the most complicated part, and honestly that took us til the very end to get them installed. Our friends joked with us for quite some time about how great our fence looked but when were we gonna get that gate in?
The process was pretty simple for us and honestly, one person could do this, but it was very helpful when both Jason and I were able to work on it together.
First, we removed the old chicken wire fence.
We used a battery-powered sawzall to remove the chicken wire from the posts in the ground. We knocked the concrete posts loose with a sledgehammer. Most of the posts came out pretty easily!
Wam Bam Fencing comes in 7′ lengths and the old fence was in 8′ lengths. This meant we did not have to dig up the old concrete as our new posts would not be going in the same spots. This saved us a LOT of time!
Once the old fence was removed, we took a measuring tape and string to map out where each post would go.
The Wam Bam fence system includes a post anchor, which you place into the ground and provides a line marker to show you were the string line needed to be to make sure it was level throughout the length of the fence.
Once all of the metal posts were in the ground, the next step was sliding on the vinyl post.
When the vinyl post was level, we drilled a screw into the post. This connected the metal pole to the post and kept everything level and together.
Once the posts were installed, we slid the horizontal vinyl beams into place between the posts.
After that, we slid the vertical fence pieces in and they basically just popped into place! Once we had the vinyl fencing how we wanted it and it was level, we used additional screws to keep the horizontal beams into place on the posts.
Would we buy it again? Absolutely!
Although there were some frustrations as our ground isn’t completely level throughout (our pool resides basically on a flat area and then surrounding it, the ground starts to taper off which caused more difficultly in making sure the fence would be level and the same height from one side of the pool to the other. But overall, the lack of having to use concrete was significantly easier! Looking back, since we used a sledgehammer to pound the poles into the ground: we would definitely recommend using a post driver instead, or renting a gas-powered post driver from your local hardware store.
