Privacy of the Back Yard Continues

After installation of our new fence this past fall, the last area I needed to address for good privacy at our house was the area between the shop and the gate. It wasn't practical to put a new fence in b           The cyclone fencing that was already there was well embedded in the ground, but being only 4’ tall meant there wasn’t much I could do with it that had any weight to it. Then there was also the problem of the trees that were leaning my direction. The neighbor already gave me the green light to cut anything I ever needed to cut that was infringing on our property, but that didn't mean I wanted to eliminate them completely. That’s when I found these shade cloths.

Most shade cloths I found on the web were the same type and thickness of fabric, varying only in size, grommets, quality of sewing, etc. They also didn't block anything other than some of the light getting through. You could still see through them pretty easily. That's when I found out the real story on the ratings. Most of these cloths are rated at 170 GSM, even though they may say 90% blockage. What I ended up buying was by Colourtree and it's rating is 220 GSM, meaning very little of anything gets through.

To get it to lay flat against the fence and be able to anchor it I needed to do a little housekeeping with my various implements of destruction. Here’s what the area looked like after I cleaned up the fence to flatten any foliage that was trying to peek through:

The bamboo that someone next door planted at some time in the past was most of what I had to clear. With some of it poking through the fence here and there I just hit it all with hedge trimmers. Cleaning up a few branches here and there was all that was left. Then I turned my attention to this "block" of shade material I had to work with:

After spreading it all out and eyeballing what I had to do, I opted to pre-hang the upper hooks at a measured height in all the trees that I would be using, then threaded some 3/8" poly rope through the upper grommet holes. After hanging the thing up all the way across, all I had to do was anchor the lower edge with the provided nylon zip ties.

I'm not totally enthusiastic about the finished product, but that's only due to the color. They don't make them in this size in brown, which was my first choice. It was either black, green, or tan. This just looks a bit "ghetto" to me. The reason I opted to use a fabric to begin with was because most of the trees are leaning, and I didn't want to deal with cutting them down. The varying angle of the finished install kind of adds to the cheesiness and gives it a tarp look. The good thing is, it totally works for what we wanted it to. We have great privacy over there now. We had a couple of good wind storms after I put it up and it didn't even move. It's stretched nice and tight and rock solid.

Maybe some day we'll get something better, but for now this will do nicely.