ARLINGTON — The National Day of Service and Remembrance project to paint a fence in the Arlington Heights neighborhood, whose preparation work ran from Sept. 11-13, was finally completed on Saturday, Oct. 5, nearly a full month after its originally scheduled completion date of Sept. 14.

Anya Zolotusky and Kim Robinson, the owners of the fence, had pledged to donate $500 — the value of refurbishing the fence — to the Arlington and Darrington community food banks, who recruited 30 volunteers to conduct prep work on the fence from Sept. 11-13, before an inhospitable drizzle on Saturday, Sept. 14, postponed the last leg of the project.

“I put a check in the mail [on Wednesday, Oct. 9] to the Arlington Community Food Bank, along with a note explaining that this was in honor of the church’s Day of Service project,” said Zolotusky, referring to the volunteers from the Arlington stake of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. “Not only was it great to get the fence painted, but I genuinely enjoyed meeting all the good folks who participated in this.”

“We put in 53 man-hours of scraping, brushing and pressure-washing that wood fence,” said Dawn Dickson, one of the coordinators of the project. “We actually had a couple of nice days to wrap up our activity.”

The fence is approximately 1,200 feet long, with four boards for each 8-foot by 10-foot section, adding up to 4,800 feet of boards that were previously painted in August of 2009. Dickson and Zolotusky had doubted that the fence would be dry enough to finish painting on Friday, Oct. 4, so the volunteers returned to the site on Oct. 5 and managed to lay down the last coat of paint within the same day.

“We felt it was a real blessing to have those few days of good weather,” Dickson said. “The nice weather [on Sunday, Oct. 6] allowed it to dry completely.”