Installing Fence Posts in Existing Concrete Footings (Reusing old footings & reusing old fence post

Do you have a wobbly wooden fence post, but you don't want to pour new concrete footings? That's the situation I was in. (I'm a homeowner and not a fencing contractor...and I didn't feel like digging out a new hole and pouring concrete.)
So I decided to remove the rotten fence post and reuse the old concrete footing.
The rotten 4x4 fence post basically snapped off at ground level leaving a bunch of rotten wood inside the 4x4 concrete footing. I dug out the hole, removed all the old wood and even dug the hole down deeper than it was initially.
Then I poured gravel into the hole to create a 4-6 inch layer of gravel at the bottom of the hole to allow better drainage.

To save even more money on this project I re-used a fence post from a different fence. (It's the red post in the video.) It had rotted at the bottom too, but the top part of the post was still solid. So I stuck the good "top" end of the red fence post into the old concrete footing. Then I backfilled around the post with gravel. Levelled it and tamped it down.
But I made a bit of a mistake because the red fence post that I stuck into the cleaned-out old concrete footing wasn't quite tall enough. (You'll see what I mean in the video.)
Once I had the installed the fence post into the old concrete footing I re-attached the fence panel.
Then I used a circular saw to cut off the top rotten part of the old red fence post I was re-using so it "almost" matched the height of the other fence posts.

Warnings about Reusing Old Concrete Footings -- There are downsides to reusing old concrete footings for your fence posts.
The first is that the old post rotted for a reason.
And chances are your existing concrete footing wasn't made properly in the first place.
For instance, the concrete footing that I re-used had a lot of dirt above the concrete next to the fence post. Fencing pros say that ideally your concrete footing should be slightly above ground level and sloped away from your post to carry water away from your post.

I know that the post I put into the old concrete footing will rot some day too...as wood posts do...but I hope I get a couple of years out of it. By then I'll probably be ready to replace the whole fence.
And it has been almost a year since I installed that fence post into the old concrete footing and it is still super solid. So I'm glad about that.

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Thank you for your time and I hope this has helped you in some way.

If you want to read the blog post write-up of this project, click here to check it out: https://www.learnalongwithme.com/reusing-wooden-fence-posts/

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