We were building a new home on a site where a previous house had stood for years, and the client was adamant that we protect three irreplaceable ornamental trees during construction. After talking with the crew, we decided that surrounding the trees with snow fencing wouldn’t cut it. Instead, we came up with our own wooden armor, which resembles giant snow fencing.
To make it, we laid 2x6s side-by-side — separated by gaps of roughly 2 inches — across a pair of sawhorses, and attached them to each other with galvanized plumber’s strapping and 1 1/4-inch screws. Then we simply rolled the assembly up, stood it against the tree, and unrolled it around the trunk, securing it with the loose strapping at each end.
The entire process took a couple of hours and cost about $200 in materials — a lot less than I would have paid had any harm come to those trees. At the end of the job, the owner asked us to leave the armor on while the landscaping took place.
