How to DIY Farmhouse Modern Fence

After painting the cabin a bright-looking white, I realized it stood out a lot more from the road and that a new farmhouse modern fence would work great to accent the house and give it some visual separation from the road.

This is another DIY project I’d love to share with you. Sure, fence construction is easily hired out. But I moved out to the country to do ACTUAL things (!!) instead of sit at a computer all day. Plus, I wanted to build a long, tall fence that I knew would cost big dollars if I hired it out. So I got to work 🙂

Here is the side yard area along the road next to the cabin. My husband and I had already cleared a lot of brush and the old barbed wire fence.

Here’s the driveway entry looking towards the road. We cleaned up a lot of the lower branches on the trees and liked how the trees form a natural entry to the drive. We wanted to keep the open feel of the entry.

Farmhouse Modern Fence Design:

Pro tip: Before constructing a fence, be sure to check with your local Building Department for local code requirements as well as local ordinances that could impact your farmhouse modern fence design.

My local Building Department allows for a 7 foot tall maximum fence to be built without a building permit. That worked great for me. Also, a county ordinance requires that a fence located within 10 feet of the roadway be no more than 50% solid.

I decided to go with a 6 foot tall fence using 8ft tall 4×4 pressure-treated posts that would be embedded 2 feet into a concrete pier. Posts were spaced at 8 foot on-center to allow for 2×6 x 8 foot boards to span horizontally between posts and create the fence. I placed 2×6 boards at every 1 foot along the post height. That kept the fence no more than 50% solid.

My husband wasn’t 100% sure about this design. He wanted a proof-of-concept, so I built one fence bay. Here it is!

Thankfully, he liked it! We decided the fence design looked a bit modern but also fit the general farmhouse style, aka a farmhouse modern fence. We mixed woods using pressure-treated posts with redwood boards. That’s OK, it will all get stained white.

Farmhouse Modern Fence Build:

I put my head down and got to work digging post holes and placing posts with fence post concrete. Yes, they have a low-cost specific concrete for fence posts. I dug holes 2 feet deep with a post hole digger and used 8-inch diameter concrete forms cut in 2ft lengths to form the hole. Check out the PLANS section of this website if you want to purchase a detail of the fence elevation (coming soon!). It’s really inexpensive and helps me create more content like this.

A post multi level really came in handy here to set the posts straight, both front-to-back and side-to-side.

I simply used a string kept tight along the face of the posts to place them in-line. Mark your post spacing on the string. You’ll see in the following photos that the height change between posts isn’t perfect. I would have done better to eyeball the top horizontal board from far away before screwing them into the post. It’s tough to see the big-picture from up close. Lesson learned here!

Here’s a look of the fence down the road line.

Once I got that side of the driveway built, I turned and went the other way!

I added even more bays on this side after the photo was taken. All said and done, I put in about 180 feet of fence length!

Finishing Touches:

The fresh natural wood look of the fence looked really nice, but I knew it would gray over time and that wasn’t a look I wanted. So I opted for an exterior wood stain here. I used a solid stain instead of a paint as the stain penetrates into the wood. A paint would simply coat the exterior which is more likely to trap water and lead to moldy wood. Nobody wants that! So I used a Behr solid stain in white that I found at Home Depot. 5 gallons was enough here.

It took 3 coats to make the color really solid and cover the pressure-treated wood. But I am happy to report that 3 years later it is still looking really good. Here is a long-shot view that catches most of the fence.

This is the fence along the cabin side.

Here is a look at the driveway entry.

I added solar lights to each end post and at some posts near the cabin. They add a soft evening/night light. Similar ones are found here.

Remember that I wanted to keep the driveway entry open looking? We could always extend the fence closer to the actual drive, but we really liked how the trees act to frame the drive and keep things very open-feeling.

What do you think? I love the farmhouse modern look and how it creates a nice buffer from the road.