Creating the Perfect Wrought Iron Fence

Some people dream of a house with a white picket fence, but any terrace house lover knows it has be to a wrought iron fence.

Although not many iron fences are actually wrought these days, our version still beats the brick monstrosity we started with, and it looks wrought, so that's good enough for us.

Site Preparation

Even though it was devastating, we started by removing the old chair. As we all know, nothing says "classy home" like an old, broken chair on the porch. Extra points if that chair is a brown couch.

We removed the brick wall and all the other muck including plants, mulch and dirt. The concrete path to the front door was removed using a crowbar and much elbow grease.

For the footing of the fence, concrete was poured 300mm wide and 400mm deep. (We also poured a concrete slab 100mm thick reinforced with steel rebar for the veranda area - blog post to come on this!). When the formwork was in, but before pouring concrete, we ran pipes for all services including internet, gas, water and a couple of spare conduits.

We had a stonemason source the bluestones and hand-chisel them across the top and front as the plinth stones. The bluestone was installed on top of footings leaving a gap with a height difference between the concrete and bluestone so that when tiles were installed they would be flush with the stone.

While the bluestone came up beautifully, the stonemason took about ten thousand years to actually turn up, and when he did, he did half the job and came back months later to finish it. 3/10 would not recommend.

Beautiful job, annoying tradie 

Fence Design and Materials 

Gary designed the fence using SolidWorks. We wanted to design it ourselves to ensure we had the symmetry, spacings and order of spears that we were after.

Our fence design

We chose small and large cast iron spears from Perry Bird Pickets in Brunswick (lovingly named PO62 and PI34 by Perry Bird). The spears follow an alternating pattern, with three even larger fancy cone-shaped spears (C061) to sit on either side of the gate, and on the ends of the fence.

I was very enthusiastic about these majestic horse heads instead of the cone spears however Gary was not.

For the rods, bars and posts, we purchased mild steel from a metal supplier.

Fence Construction Process 

First, all steep parts were cut to length using an angle grinder. The holes in the top bar were water jet cut to size and at the correct spacing offsite. It turns out that cutting things using water is an ACTUAL THING which is pretty cool.

Gary welded all of the fence parts together, except for the spears. Offsite, the welded parts of the fence were galavanised (a process to stop rust). The spears were not welded on at this point because reproduction spears are cast iron and cannot be galvanised. Forged or CNC-machined spears are exorbitantly expensive and nearly impossible to source from anywhere due to cost.

The fence was created in two halves to make transportation and installation easier, but if we were to do this again we would make it all in one piece (despite the significant additional burden with transportation and installing) so it is perfectly straight.

After the two halves had been galvanised, we then welded the spears on to the rest of the fence. The spears were difficult to fit; they didn't slide on easily or very far and were difficult to weld on properly. If we were to do this again, we would have the spears drilled out underneath to match the diameter of the steel rods, or have the steel rods machined/turned down to fit inside the small holes.

After all this fuss, the last glorious step was to spray paint the fence in Colourbond Deep Ocean.

Gate welded before galvanising

Spears welded on

Fence Installation Process

Holes were drilled in the bluestone for the rods to be inserted into. We secured the rods into place with epoxy resin designed for stone and steel balustrades.

The fence was bolted to the wall using Dyna-bolts and epoxy resin. At this point the join in the middle of the two sections of fence was welded together to attach the halves (with a fair amount of stuffing it up and talk of cancelling "this whole dumb fence idea"), and finally the support post on the back was welded to the fence and epoxy resin was used to secure it to its place on the ground.

We also spray painted and attached the letterbox using 20ml conduit saddles to match the 20mm rods so that it's not permanently attached to the fence.

Fence holes marked out. The holes were drilled with 25mm masonry drill bit in a hammer drill.

Injecting resin

Section 1 in place

Section 2 in place

Whoops

The angle grinder fixed up the mishap but we would recommend just making the fence in one part.
Measure twice, cut once, team. Or as we like to say, cut three times and grumble more.

Was all the fuss worth it or should we have just paid someone to make it?

Quotes from companies to make this fence for us ranged from about $8 000 to $12 000. Those are pretty drastic numbers and there was no possibility of us ever paying that amount for a 5 metre fence.  As you'll see below in the cost breakdown, we saved upwards of $5 000 doing this ourselves. It took A LOT of hours and effort but the quality is amazing and it has come up beautifully. It is also helpful that due to our impeccable design it doubles as a barrier in a zombie apocalypse.

Cost: $3310 (Concrete $400 + DIY labour; Bluestone $1500 installed; Steel $300; Spears $250; Welding consumables $150; Galvanising $400; Paint $150; Epoxy resin $60, Water jet cutting $100). Quotes from fence companies for the complete fence were $8-12k.

Time taken: 80-100 hours labour 

-Emily