Landscaping

For the first year or two I did not think about it much. Timber goes grey, that is what timber does. Then I started actually looking at the fences around here and noticed how many of them had gone wavy. Boards cupped, palings twisted far enough to pull off their own nails. That is the Auckland sun. It bakes the face of the board dry while the back stays damp, the two sides move at different rates, and the board bends. Once it has bent it does not come back.

So now I stain everything. The shed was the first one, back in February 2021, and I roped the girls in because there is a lot of wall and not much fun in it. They did the bottom half, I did the top, and one of them came away with more stain on her hands than on the shed. The fence went the same way at the end of 2022, including the narrow bit down the side where the water tank sits almost against the palings. Somebody had to squeeze in there. It was not me.

The garden boxes and the edging get done too. I am not going to tell you stain stops timber moving, because it does not. I have got boards here that have twisted anyway. What it does is slow it down, and slowing it down is most of the battle when the alternative is building the whole thing again in five years.

One thing I did not expect. The paper wasps leave the stained timber alone. They make their nests by scraping fibre off bare weathered boards, and once there is stain on it there is nothing soft to scrape. Whatever the reason, the nests round here are all on fences that never got done.

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