Won my fencing bout

 Not sabre or epee, garden.

I was watching a squirrel run along the garden fence yesterday and realised part of it was sagging free of the concrete post - it's the slatted wooden panel slotted into grooves in the posts type. So I wandered out and realised the end upright in the panel had pulled 90% free of the rest of it, letting the whole thing sag free. I pushed it back in place and put it down to try and fix tomorrow, hopefully when my neighbour was around as it's almost impossible to put a panel back in single-handed.

I heard a couple of hammer-y bangs while I was in the bath this morning, wondered if he was having a go at it on his own, so hurried out to help. It wasn't him, according to his wife he's over at their daughter's, doing some fencing. *headdesk*. Worse, the panel was now lying flat in my garden, in three pieces, with both uprights now separate.

Each panel has horizontal top, bottom and middle bars, two vertical uprights, and latted vertical slats. Now anyone sensible would nail the frame together, then tack the slats on top. Not these guys, the uprights and horizontals are butted up together, then the slats nailed to all of them to hold everything together. So if you lose the end slat holding the upright on, or the bottom corner of the slat rots because the slope of the garden means it's fractionally below ground level and wet a lot, then the whole thing falls apart. Plus general wear and tear over a decade plus of gales and winters meant a lot of the slats had popped free of the original nails.

When I was looking at it, I realised the bottom horizontal was still in between the posts, so if I could get it back together without moving it there was a chance I could just pivot it back into place. Fortunately I had a bunch of wide-headed nails left over from re-felting the shed that were just right for tacking the slats back in place, so I hammered every one of those suckers down top and bottom (bar the four at the one end that were rotten at the bottom). That left that one corner unsupported, so I chiselled out the rotten wood, cut a bit of spare wood to fit, nailed it to bottom and to upright, pivoted the whole thing upright and with a bit of brute force and ignorance managed to pop it into place.

I am in no way a carpenter, I barely qualify for the bodge-it together end of the scale, but I suspect that panel is now held together better than it was new!