Hand-made goods

Arnold found some plastic caps for the fence posts -- they screw on, they're paintable and they'll never rot -- and after showing them to me went back to the drawing board.

He cut some squares out of our leftover deck wood, made a few passes through the table saw (since he'd packed up his radial-arm saw), and studied the result.

He made a few adjustments and then cut out caps. "If you bought these things from Strunk, they'd be 8 or 10 bucks apiece," he said. "I can make the whole batch in, what?, 20 minutes?"

Franklin took a look at the stack when he came through the other day, and said, "Man, these will be sittin' on the ground when the posts have rotted away in a hundred years."

So Brantley countersunk and drilled them (you can't get a nail through the wood), leveled them on top of the posts and Arnold fashioned a trim to marry them to the posts.

He gave them his highest compliment today. After stapling the trim on, he pulled back and took a hard look. "They'll do," he said.