Like many terraces, behind our garden's back fence is an old 'dunny lane' with street access at the end, once used by what I have come to understand as the poo-collector (?!) for the old outhouses (of which we still see many in backyards in our local area), now conveniently used for storing our garbage bins. The retaining wall between the garden and the lane was our number one priority, as it didn't actually exist - the backyard effectively just tumbled down into the lane.
We used an existing metal L-beam which had been concreted into the ground behind the tree, and the brick wall on the other side, to affix metal brackets. The brackets were specially designed to hold treated pine sleepers, which you can just slide in to make a ready-made retaining wall. When attaching the brackets, we faced our first power tool lesson - the hammer drill. Yep. Contrary to my exceptionally wild imagination, it turned out to be simply a more powerful type of drill, capable of drilling into harder materials. Simple. We also learned at this juncture about masonry anchors - little plastic or metal gadgets you stick into the hole you've drilled in the brick which will then hold a bolt or screw. This all seems so obvious now, and I suppose is testament to our initial inexperience.
Next was the back fence - with one hammer hit the entire back fence collapsed - it had been held together by an impressively-miscellaneous collection of tent poles and string! We bought some treated pine, learned how to use our circular saw to cut it to size, and then bolted the pine into the brackets we used for the retaining wall.
We bought some relatively cheap pieces of tallow wood from a local lumber yard and just cut these to length and screwed them onto the uprights. A coat of clear treatment on the fence and we were done.
And voila!
Well, 'voila' until we returned home less than a week later to discover many of the timber slats had sheared off. Rookie error #1 - timber spans always need to be accounted for in terms of strength (floors, walls, you name it). Our long timber spans had naturally bent alongside changes in the weather, but we had not provided sufficient support for them to withstand these forces. I'm pretty sure I actually cried that day. However, all was not lost - the addition of an extra, centred upright did the trick, and the fence has been sturdy as a rock ever since!
