Why we finish both sides.

The fence I grew up looking at in Boucherville had a “good” side and a “bad” side. The good side faced the street. The bad side — framing members exposed, nail heads showing, pickets hanging off crooked 2×4 rails — faced me, our swing set, and our kitchen window.

My father was a decent carpenter. He explained that building a fence with two good faces meant doubling the picket count, which doubled the cost. I accepted this as one of those adult facts, the way I accepted that a Mr. Freeze costs a quarter.

Twenty-seven years later I bought a mill. The first panel we prototyped was a shadowbox — pickets alternating across both faces of the centre stringer. It uses only a few more board-feet than a traditional back-rail design. The joinery is slightly more fussy, but it’s the kind of fussy a Weinig moulder handles without complaint. On a per-panel basis, the material uplift is about eleven dollars at our wholesale cost.

Eleven dollars to avoid putting the ugly side of anything toward the people you live next to. We called it the Good Neighbour because that’s literally what it is. Our first mill run was 1,200 panels. It sold out in ten days to our first four Polaris Pro yards. The kitchen-window view of the next generation is going to be better than mine.