Welcome to mother daughter projects. I'm Steph. I'm Vicki and today we're going to
show you how we made this outdoor PVC privacy screen. Come join us!
Prior to assembling all the PVC, I sanded everything to give it a little bit of
tooth. And I used this really kind of fun hack. I used an orbital battery-powered
sander. I turned it upside down and clamped it to my workspace and that way
I was able to use the sander hands-free. Next we made a PVC frame for the slices
to fit into. We made the height 45 inches by 35 inches wide. I used the miter saw to
cut the one-inch pipe to length. We use two elbows and two tees to attach it all
together. Next we moved on to cutting a ton of various sizes of PVC pipe. We clamped a
piece of wood to the left side to act as a stop block so all the rounds were the
same thickness. We cut the PVC pipe on our miter saw and
we quickly realized that the cut pieces were unpredictable. Some of them flew
away from miter saw. Some of them stayed in place. So if you're going to do this, make
sure you use all safety precautions. don't have anything behind your miter
saw. We also did some research afterwards and found that a higher tooth count on a
blade can work a little bit better. Ours is only a 60 count so something a little
bit higher could have done a better job. Also, it's probably going to ruin your blade
so keep that in mind. Don't use a super expensive blade to cut your PVC. I wasn't
comfortable cutting the shorter pieces on the miter saw so I used our portable
bandsaw to get a few more rounds cut from these pieces. And with a higher
tooth count on the blade it made nice safe cuts but there was a little bit
more to clean up which we did on the orbital sander.
We placed our first round of cut slices. We laid the frame on a piece of
insulation foam so it could be easily moved around. We realized pretty quickly
that we are going to need a lot more PVC rounds so we purchase more pipe and made
the cuts off-camera. Cutting and sanding PVC is really really messy it's really
important protect your eyes and your nose and it's important to protect your
environment. Don't just sweep that into the
environment. Use a vacuum to clean it all up. With all our slices placed, we opened
a tube of construction adhesive, placed it in our battery-powered caulk gun and
started to glue the pieces.
We had all our PVC laid out ready to go and it was time to glue. So here we are
starting the gluing process and the first thing we realized was "it's a slow
process!" So it took probably about four hours to get the whole thing done. We had
some music planing so we were doing okay. But what we did is we drew a little line
where the pipes connected then we glued using construction adhesive and
we just kept that process going. And quickly we realized that it was better
if we both did our own thing and we we were able to complete it a little bit
faster when we did that. We got our last piece in place in a quick high-five for
a job well done!
We waited 24 hours and then lifted it up to see if it would hold. Success! Here you
can see we're spray-painting PVC white. And we're doing that because PVC can
yellow over time and we're hoping that this will keep it from doing that. Back
at my house we remove the old screen and brought in the new one. We're using
two-foot-long rebar to secure it to the ground. It fit nicely but we had two
issues. One it was leaning, and two, the ground was uneven so it's not level. No
matter we cut a two and a half inch piece of PVC and added it to the left
side so the structure would be level. Then we got two more pieces of rebar and
that added a lot more structural support and allowed it to stand up straight.
And here it is all finished. We love the look it adds to my curb appeal and if
you look closely you can find a hidden Mickey. "What we learned." When we finished
this I looked at it and I said "you know this looks like a piece of art." I really
love the look of it and we've even talked about putting some air plants in
the bigger holes just to add a little bit more more flavor to it because it looks
like art. I've actually had a couple ideas of using this design similar to
this inside my living room so stay tuned we might do that in the future. You're
probably wondering why we didn't use PVC glue. But we knew we were going to have
to do a lot of gluing and PVC glue is really very toxic and very smelly and we
really didn't want to deal with that so that's why we use the outdoor
construction adhesive. And your biggest question might be how is it going to hold
up because that's our biggest question. And we really have no idea. We wanted to
try to make it as strong as possible so we'll see if it holds up. We'll keep you
updated on our weekly show Workshop Wednesday. We'll let you know if we
have any issues with it. We do have extreme hot, sometimes cold and rainy,
temperatures here in Florida so it'll be interesting to see the progress of it. So
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