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🔗 Save $6,000 A Year with My Complete Amish Home-Saving Method I teach:
https://eliasyoder.com
You build a fence, a deck, or set a row of posts — good honest wood — and you are proud of it. Then a few short years go by and it is going gray and soft, the posts rotting away at the ground line, the whole thing failing and needing torn out and built again. Most folks figure that is just the way of it, that outdoor wood rots and you replace it every few years or pay dear for treated lumber or plastic boards. But the old farmers knew better. With a few simple old methods, costing little or nothing, you can make your outdoor wood last not five years, not ten, but fifty, a hundred years and more — a lifetime and your children's lifetime. The old barns and fences standing sound after a century are the proof. In this video I show you how they did it.
I am Elias, and I keep up this Lancaster County place with my own hands, the way my people always have, and out here a fence or a barn must last. Now I will tell you plainly: some folks will tell you to soak your posts in used motor oil and diesel fuel, and I will NOT tell you to do that — it is a poison you do not want soaking into the ground
https://eliasyoder.com
You build a fence, a deck, or set a row of posts — good honest wood — and you are proud of it. Then a few short years go by and it is going gray and soft, the posts rotting away at the ground line, the whole thing failing and needing torn out and built again. Most folks figure that is just the way of it, that outdoor wood rots and you replace it every few years or pay dear for treated lumber or plastic boards. But the old farmers knew better. With a few simple old methods, costing little or nothing, you can make your outdoor wood last not five years, not ten, but fifty, a hundred years and more — a lifetime and your children's lifetime. The old barns and fences standing sound after a century are the proof. In this video I show you how they did it.
I am Elias, and I keep up this Lancaster County place with my own hands, the way my people always have, and out here a fence or a barn must last. Now I will tell you plainly: some folks will tell you to soak your posts in used motor oil and diesel fuel, and I will NOT tell you to do that — it is a poison you do not want soaking into the ground
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00:00You build a fence, or a deck, or set a row of posts, good, honest wood, and you are proud
00:06of it.
00:06And then a few short years go by, and you see it going gray and soft,
00:12the posts rotting away at the ground line, the boards turning punky and weak,
00:17and before long, the whole thing is failing and must be torn out and built again.
00:23Most folks figure that is just the way of it, that outdoor wood rots,
00:27and there is nothing to be done but replace it every so often,
00:31or pay dear for the special treated lumber or the plastic boards.
00:35But here is the truth the old farmers knew.
00:39With a few simple old methods costing little or nothing,
00:43you can make your outdoor wood last not five years, not ten, but fifty, a hundred years, and more,
00:51last a lifetime and your children's lifetime.
00:54The old barns and fences standing sound after a century are the proof of it.
01:01Today, I am going to show you how they did it.
01:04I am Elias, and I keep up this Lancaster County place with my own hands,
01:09the way my people always have, and out here, a fence or a barn must last,
01:15for we cannot be tearing them down and building anew every few years.
01:20The old people built things to last generations,
01:23and they had the knowing to make plain wood stand a hundred years against the weather.
01:29Now I will tell you plain.
01:31There are some folks who will tell you to soak your wood and your posts
01:35in used motor oil and diesel fuel to preserve them.
01:39And I will not tell you to do that, for that is a poison you do not want soaking into
01:45the ground
01:45where your garden grows and your well draws and your children play.
01:50And in many places it is against the law besides, for good reason.
01:55The old farmers had cleaner ways, better ways, that did not foul their own land.
02:01And those are the ways I will give you, for they are the true old methods, and they last just
02:07as long.
02:08Let me tell you about a fence on my grandfather's place that taught me all this.
02:14There was a line of locust posts along the lane that my grandfather always told me
02:19his own grandfather had set, before the war, generations back,
02:23and they were standing yet, gray and hard as iron, when I was a boy.
02:28And for all I know, some stand yet today.
02:32A hundred years and more in the ground, those posts, and still sound.
02:37As a boy, I could not fathom it, how a wooden post stuck in the wet ground
02:42could outlast three generations of men, when I had seen other posts rot through in a few short years.
02:49And my grandfather showed me.
02:51He showed me the locust wood, hard and oily and rot-proof by its nature.
02:57He showed me how the bottoms had been charred black in a fire before setting.
03:02He showed me how the ground was mounded away from each one.
03:06None of it cost a penny, he said.
03:08It was just the knowing, the way you set a post to last a lifetime instead of a few seasons.
03:14That knowing is what I want to hand you today, for it is nearly lost,
03:19and it is worth more than any product on a shelf.
03:22Quick word before I go further.
03:24The old methods my family uses, there is more of it than fits in any one video.
03:30I gathered the whole of it into a book at EliasYoder.com.
03:35The book is the long version.
03:37If you want it, it is there.
03:39I will not mention it again.
03:41So before the methods, you must understand the one true enemy of outdoor wood.
03:47For once you see it, every one of these methods makes plain sense.
03:51The enemy is water.
03:54It is not the sun, not the cold, not the wind, not even the bugs, first and foremost.
04:00It is the water.
04:02Wood that stays dry lasts near forever,
04:05and there are timbers in old dry barns sound as the day they were cut 300 years ago.
04:11But wood that stays wet rots, for the wet is what breeds the rot fungus that eats the wood,
04:18and the wet is what draws the wood-boring bugs that finish it off.
04:22So the whole secret of making wood last, every method I will give you, comes down to one thing.
04:29Keeping the water off and out of the wood, or keeping the wood dry enough that the rot cannot get
04:35a hold.
04:37Master that one idea, and you can make any wood last.
04:40So let us go through the ways the old people kept their wood dry.
04:44The first method, and it is the cleverest and the most overlooked, is to put a roof on it.
04:51Now that sounds a strange thing to say of a fence, but hear me.
04:54The old builders, and you see this beautifully in the old fences and gates of Japan that have stood for
05:01centuries,
05:02would put a little roof, a cap, a slanted board, right along the top of a fence, or over a
05:09post or a gate.
05:11Why?
05:12Because the top end of a post or a board, the end grain, the cut end, drinks up water like
05:19a straw,
05:19far worse than the sides do, and a fence, with its top exposed to every rain,
05:26soaks that water down into itself and rots from the top down and at every post top.
05:32But cap that fence with a little roof board, slanted to shed the rain off to the side,
05:38and the rain never sits on the wood at all.
05:41It runs right off, and the wood beneath stays dry and sound for generations.
05:47The same for a single post, a little cap or a slanted cut on top so the water sheds off
05:54rather than soaking in.
05:56It is the simplest thing in the world, a board laid along the top,
06:01and it may be the single greatest thing you can do to make a fence last.
06:05The old farmers capped their posts and roofed their fences,
06:09and that is a chief reason the old ones still stand.
06:13And understand the why of the end grain, for it is the key to half of all wood rot.
06:20A piece of wood is like a bundle of tiny straws all running its length,
06:25and the cut end is where all those straws are open, sucking up any water that sits on them,
06:32drawing it deep down into the heart of the wood where it rots from the inside.
06:36The long sides shed water far better, for there the straws run sideways and are closed.
06:44So it is always the cut ends, the post tops, the bored ends, that rot first and worst.
06:51Knowing that, you protect the ends above all, cap them, slant them, paint the cut ends with your oil,
06:59keep the rain off them, and you have headed off the worst of the rot.
07:03A man who only learns this one thing, to protect the end grain,
07:09will double the life of everything he builds outdoors.
07:13The second method is for the most vulnerable spot of all on any post,
07:19the place where it meets the ground,
07:21for that is where near every fence post rots through and falls.
07:25Right at the ground line, where the post is wet from the soil below and the rain pooling around it,
07:33that is where the rot eats through while the rest of the post stands sound.
07:38So the old way is to shed the water away from that spot.
07:43When you set a post, you do not leave the ground dished in around it where water pools and sits
07:50against the wood.
07:51Instead, you mound the soil, or if you set the post in concrete, you crown that concrete,
07:59mounding it up around the post and sloping it down and away, like a little hill,
08:04so the rain runs off away from the post rather than pooling against it.
08:10Water shed away from the base is water that cannot rot the base.
08:14A post set with the ground sloped away from it stands far longer than one sitting in a little bowl
08:22that catches and holds every rain.
08:25The third method is the real old secret,
08:29the one that sounds backwards but is the genuine ancient way to preserve wood,
08:34and it is to burn it, to char it.
08:38Now you will think me mad, burning the very wood you want to save,
08:42but hear the sense of it, for it is real and it is old.
08:47When you char the surface of wood, blacken it with fire to a shallow depth,
08:52that charred black layer becomes a shell that resists both the water and the rot and the bugs.
09:00The char does not soak up water the way raw wood does,
09:04and the rot fungus and the wood bugs will not eat that burnt carbon layer.
09:09So a charred post sheds water and turns away the very things that rot it.
09:16The old farmers knew this and would char the bottoms of their fence posts,
09:20the part that goes in the ground,
09:22holding the post end in a fire or burning it with a torch till it was blackened before setting it.
09:29That charred bottom resisted the ground rot for decades,
09:33and the Japanese made a high art of it,
09:36charring whole boards black to side their houses,
09:39boards that then last a hundred years and more,
09:42and it is a beautiful deep black finish besides.
09:46And there is a sense to it beyond just the shell,
09:49for the char also drives the moisture out of that surface wood and seals it,
09:54and a dry sealed surface is no home for the rot.
09:58You do not burn it to ash, mind, nor weaken the post.
10:02You only char the surface, a shallow, blackened skin, perhaps a quarter inch deep,
10:08and the good strong wood is sound beneath it.
10:12For a fence post, you char the bottom foot or two,
10:15all the part that goes in the ground and a bit above the ground line,
10:19for that is where it rots.
10:21Some quench it with water after, or brush off the loose ash and oil it,
10:26but the char is the heart of it.
10:28I will give you the full how-to of charring wood properly in another video,
10:33for it deserves its own telling.
10:35But know that this is the genuine old free preservative, fire,
10:40and it poisons nothing.
10:43It is a wonder that the very thing you would think destroys wood,
10:47fire, used right, is what makes it last the longest of all,
10:52and it costs you nothing but the burning.
10:55The fourth method is to choose the right wood to begin with,
10:59for some woods are by their own nature far more rot-resistant than others,
11:04and the old people knew exactly which to use for posts and outdoor work.
11:09The soft, pale woods, like pine, rot quickly in the weather,
11:14but certain woods carry their own natural oils and substances
11:18that resist the rot for decades, even untreated.
11:22The cedar is one, light and rot-resistant,
11:26long a favorite for posts and shingles and siding.
11:29The black locust is another, and a famous one for fence posts,
11:34so hard and rot-resistant that the old saying goes,
11:38a locust post will outlast two holes,
11:42meaning the post stands so long you will dig it up and reset it in a new hole before it
11:47rots,
11:48and locust posts set by a grandfather still stand for the grandson.
11:54The osage orange, the hedge apple, is harder still, near everlasting in the ground.
12:00The old oak, the chestnut where it once grew.
12:04So if you are setting posts to last,
12:07seek out the locust, or the cedar, or the osage orange,
12:11rather than the soft pine,
12:13and you are halfway to a hundred years before you do another thing.
12:18Use the wood the old people used for the job,
12:21for they learned over generations which woods last.
12:25And here is a thing worth knowing about any wood,
12:28that the heartwood, the dark, dense wood from the center of the tree,
12:33is far more rot-resistant than the pale sapwood from just under the bark.
12:38For the heartwood is the old, dead core,
12:42full of the tree's own preserving substances,
12:45while the sapwood is young and soft and rots quick.
12:49So even in a good post, it is the heartwood that lasts,
12:53and a post that is all good heartwood
12:56outlasts one with much pale sapwood on it.
12:59The old timber getters chose their posts for the heartwood,
13:04and a true locust or cedar heart post in the ground
13:07is about as near to everlasting as wood gets.
13:11So choose the right kind of wood,
13:14and choose the good heart of it,
13:16and you start with a post that wants to last.
13:20The fifth method is to keep the wood up out of the wet wherever you can,
13:25off the ground and out of standing water.
13:28For wood in the open air, dry and airy, lasts near forever,
13:33while wood sitting in wet ground or trapped against wet rots fast.
13:39So where you can, you set your wood up off the ground,
13:43a deck post up on a bit of stone or a metal base
13:47rather than buried in wet soil,
13:49a board with an air gap beneath it rather than lying flat on the damp.
13:54The old buildings were set up on stone foundations
13:57to lift the wood up off the wet ground,
14:00and that lifting is a chief reason the old timbers lasted.
14:04Air moving all round a piece of wood keeps it dry,
14:09and dry wood does not rot.
14:11So lift it, give it air,
14:14keep it from sitting trapped against the wet,
14:17and it lasts.
14:18This is why two boards bolted tight face to face
14:21rot between them where the wet gets trapped and cannot dry,
14:26while the same boards with an air gap between them stay sound.
14:30It is why a deck board cups and rots
14:33where it lies flat and traps water,
14:35and why the old builders left their gaps
14:37and their air spaces with care.
14:40So in all your building,
14:42think where the water will sit
14:44and where the air can reach,
14:46and contrive it so the wet drains off and away
14:49and the air dries every face.
14:52Wood that can dry between rains lasts.
14:56Wood that stays trapped wet does not.
14:59And one more.
15:01Season your wood well and dry
15:03before you ever build with it or treat it,
15:06for green wet wood built up tight
15:09will rot from the moisture sealed inside it,
15:12and no finish takes well to wet wood.
15:16Dry it first,
15:18build it dry,
15:19keep it dry,
15:20and it lasts.
15:22And the sixth.
15:23For when you do want to put a finish on wood for the weather,
15:27use the honest old natural ones rather than the poison.
15:32The old people did treat their wood with oils and tars,
15:36but with clean, natural ones.
15:39Boiled linseed oil,
15:40which is pressed from the flax seed,
15:42soaks into wood and helps shed water
15:45and has been used to treat and finish wood for centuries.
15:49And it is a clean plant oil,
15:52not a poison.
15:53Pine tar,
15:54cooked from the pine wood,
15:56is another genuine old wood preserver,
15:59brushed on barns and boats and fences
16:02for hundreds of years.
16:03And the old folk would mix the linseed oil
16:06and the pine tar together
16:08for a fine traditional wood treatment
16:11that protects for years
16:12and harms nothing.
16:14These want renewing every few years as they weather,
16:18but they are clean and old and true,
16:21and they will not foul your soil nor your water.
16:25So if you want a brushed on finish,
16:28reach for the boiled linseed oil and the pine tar,
16:31the honest old preservers,
16:33and leave the crankcase oil out of it entirely.
16:37A word on using the linseed oil,
16:39for it goes on best warmed a little and thinned,
16:43soaking it well into the wood
16:45and the end grain especially,
16:47two or three coats,
16:49letting each soak in and dry before the next.
16:52It dries slow,
16:54so give it time and sun.
16:56And one true safety word on it,
16:59for I will always tell you the safety.
17:01The rags soaked in linseed oil
17:04can take fire on their own
17:06as the oil cures,
17:07by themselves with no flame.
17:10So you never leave a wad of oily rags balled up,
17:14but lay them flat out in the open air
17:17to dry hard or sink them in water
17:19before you throw them away.
17:22Mind that,
17:23and the linseed oil is a fine,
17:25clean, old finish.
17:27The pine tar you can brush on heavier
17:29for a fence or a barn or a boat,
17:32a thick, dark, protective coat,
17:34and mixed with the linseed oil,
17:36it brushes easier and soaks in better.
17:40These are the true old finishes,
17:42used for centuries,
17:44clean and lasting both.
17:46Now let me say the small honest word
17:49about why these cheap old wood-saving ways
17:52got forgotten
17:53while you were sold the deer-treated lumber
17:55and the costly stains.
17:58Not to rile you up,
17:59just so you see the shape of it.
18:01There is good money
18:03in the pressure-treated lumber
18:05bought at a premium,
18:06in the five-gallon stains
18:08at $200 a pail,
18:10in the plastic decking
18:11at $30 a board,
18:13and in the tearing out
18:14and rebuilding of fences and decks
18:17that were never made to last.
18:19And there is no money at all
18:21in a man knowing
18:22he can cap his fence
18:24with a scrap board,
18:25char his post bottoms in a fire,
18:28choose a locust post,
18:29and brush on a little linseed oil
18:32and pine tar,
18:33all for next to nothing.
18:35You cannot patent a roof board,
18:37nor a charred post,
18:39nor a flame.
18:40So nobody advertises these old ways,
18:43no business is built on teaching them,
18:45and they simply fell out of the common knowing
18:48while the deer products
18:49got all the telling.
18:51I am not saying a man schemed this.
18:54No one had to.
18:55It is worse than a conspiracy,
18:58because it is a system
18:59nobody had to coordinate.
19:01It simply pays to sell the treated board
19:04and the deer stain again and again,
19:07and pays nothing to teach a body
19:09the old free ways
19:11that make plain wood last a century.
19:14And so the old ways
19:15went quietly untaught.
19:17The old farmers built fences and barns
19:20that outlived them by generations
19:21for next to nothing
19:23because they had to
19:25and because they knew how.
19:27So there are the old ways
19:29to make your outdoor wood
19:30last a lifetime and more,
19:33and they all come down
19:35to keeping the water off and out.
19:38Roof and cap your fences and posts
19:41so the rain sheds off the top.
19:43Slope the ground away from the post base
19:46so the water cannot pool against it.
19:48Char the bottoms of your posts in a fire
19:52to make a rot-proof shell.
19:54Choose the naturally rot-resistant woods,
19:57the locust and cedar and osage orange,
20:00for the work.
20:02Keep your wood up off the wet ground
20:05and give it air,
20:06and finish it, if you finish it,
20:08with the clean old linseed oil
20:11and pine tar,
20:12never the poison oils.
20:14Do those things,
20:16and your fence or your deck
20:18will stand sound
20:19long after the store-bought one
20:21has rotted away
20:22for almost nothing
20:24the way the old barns still stand.
20:28Now I want to hear from you,
20:30and I ask honest
20:32because I learn the whole country
20:34from these comments.
20:36Tell me in the comments below,
20:38do you have an old fence
20:39or barn or deck on your place
20:42that has lasted far beyond its years,
20:44and do you know
20:46how the old builders treated it?
20:48And tell me your county
20:49and your climate,
20:51because the wet, rainy places
20:53rot wood far faster than the dry,
20:56and I like to map it
20:57by where you all write from.
20:59I read every one.
21:02Next time,
21:03I want to show you
21:04the full old way
21:05of charring wood
21:07to preserve it
21:08step by step,
21:09how to blacken
21:10your posts and boards
21:12with fire
21:12to that rot-proof,
21:14water-shedding,
21:15handsome black finish
21:17that lasts a hundred years,
21:20the genuine ancient method
21:22that costs you
21:23nothing but a flame.
21:25The old people built fences
21:27and barns and homes
21:29meant to outlast them,
21:31to be handed down sound
21:33to children and grandchildren,
21:34and they made plain wood
21:37stand a century
21:38against the weather
21:39with nothing but their knowing,
21:41a roof board,
21:43a charred post,
21:45the right wood,
21:46a brush of linseed oil.
21:48There is a deep wisdom
21:50in building a thing
21:51to last generations
21:53rather than to be torn out
21:55and replaced.
21:56The fence and the barn
21:58built to outlive their builder
22:00are the ones that remember
22:01how the old people
22:03made things to last.
22:05The people who built this country
22:07with their hands knew that,
22:09and we are only just starting
22:11to remember it.
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