Hello, everyone! Long time /r/DIY lurker, first time poster. My in-laws have an issue with their fence getting destroyed by moisture. They just replaced their fence this last weekend and have asked me to help figure out a way to keep this new fence from getting destroyed so quickly.Here's an album of the pictures I took of the fence. My apologies for the crappy photos. It was dark when I came to look and there's really not much space to work with here.My in-laws have a weird issue where the neighbors have a load-retaining wall of railroad ties in their front yard right next to my in-laws' backyard. According to my mother-in-law, my in-laws are responsible for the fence, so they can't put the fence up where the railroad ties are. This means has to be next to the railroad ties, making this large gap between the fence and railroad ties. The old fence succumbed to rot pretty darn quickly thanks to the leaves and moisture piling up in this space. They just replaced the fence, but the same thing is sure to happen again. The fence panels are about 8 feet apart on-center. The height difference between the top of the railroad ties and the ground on my in-laws' side ranges from about 1' high to about 4' high. The whole fence runs about 32 feet. The posts seem to be standard pretreated 4x4s, so the void is probably about 3.5" wide at the narrowest point and about 4" wide at the widest point. The fence is on a pretty decent slope down to the street (about a three foot drop over thirty feet). The main goal is to get the water to flow nice and evenly down the hill while preventing leaves from piling up.I've been tasked with finding a way to prevent this from happening. I'd thought of maybe reinforcing the bottoms of the panels with a few more screws and filling the void with gravel or maybe placing cheap bags of concrete in the void in order to at the very least keep the leaves from piling up, but I'm not sure. There's some space between the fence panels and the ground, but not much. So leaves will definitely pile up in this current state.Does anyone have any ideas? I'd like to keep it relatively cheap. Since the neighbors have apparently been butts about the whole thing, I don't particularly care if it looks good. That void is on their side of the fence anyways, and most of the water that piles up in there is from their relatively new French drain setup that dumps darn near directly into this void (which—if I'm not mistaken—is illegal, but I'm just here to fix the damage, not fight their legal battles XD).Thanks in advance for any suggestions! via /r/DIY https://ift.tt/2HpYd5q
