willshak wrote:
blue wrote:
snip
The fence is 17 cedar 1x6's per 8 ft section, with 2 2x4's on edge at
the back (one at top, one near bottom). There is a cedar 2x4 laying
flat on top of the on edge 2x4 at the top. On the front of the fence
there will be a 1x4 cedar trim piece right underneath the 2x4 that is
laying flat, and a 1x6 cedar trim piece at the bottom. Since the space
between our boards is minimal, and thus the chance of seeing any
greyed cedar is slim, and that the "uglier" (although neither side of
this fence is ugly) side of the fence will be facing back alley and
neighbours, is it necessary to stain the backside of these trim boards?


Since the 'ugly' side is usually supposed to face the fence owner's
property, you would have to stain it
Facing the ugly side to your property may only be a courtesy in your
area, but it could be local code. You might want to check on that.

No code here for which side of fence faces where. The owner next door
lives in a different province and has rented out the house for the last
10 years rents. The previous fence was rotten and falling over (and the
neighbour never payed for any of it). We asked him if he would like to
share the cost of the new fence and we would do all the labour, he
refused saying he doesn't care if there is a fence or not since he is
just renting the place out. Thus, ugly side goes to them. Well and also
because he had a shed a foot and a half on our property on the side
where there is 100' of fence, we asked politely for him to move it since
we didn't want to give up 150' of property to him by placing the fence
1.5' onto our property. We offered to help move it, gave him several
months notice, he said he didn't want to put any effort in since he just
rented out the house. We ended spending a day of our time getting the
she moved nicely onto his property when we could have spent that time
building our fence.

Other neighbour is super nice guy, he offered to pay for half of the
fence on his side without us even asking but we told him not to worry
since there is less than 30' of fence between our houses. That side we
will be alternating sections, ugly side/good side.

Also, the fence design we made looks identical on either side with the
exception that one side has the rough side of the cedar fence boards and
you see 2x4's for trim instead of a 1x6 and 1x4. We intentionally
designed it this way so that if we had to alternate ugly side/good side
on both side, it would still look decent for us.

A code saying if you pay for an entire fence and put in all the labour,
yet have to have the good side to your neighbour seems absurd to me.
What would prompt a neighbour to ever pay for half? And what would you
do when both people pay for the fence?

It is also important if your fence has a horizontal rail in the middle
of the pickets between posts. You don't want to give burglars, or other
neer-do-wells, a good foothold to climb the fence.

It doesn't.

Any advice on whether the back side of trim needs to be stained for the
benefit of the cedar?

Not staining them would save me alot of time not having to wait for
that side to dry before we put them up. We could just put up the trim
and I could stain the fronts and edges right up on the fence.

If there is an advantage to staining the backsides, I definately will.
If it is a waste of my time, then I'd rather not. Any opinions?