Fence Company in Mauldin, SC

We are a fence company in Mauldin, SC, and the work here skews heavily toward replacement rather than first fences. Mauldin counted 24,724 people at the 2020 census, which makes it the 19th most populous city in South Carolina, and the median age is 39.2. The housing matches that: settled, well kept and mostly built between the early 1970s and the 1990s.

Mauldin was rechartered as a city in 1969 and annexed five subdivisions in 1972, and Interstate 385 did the rest. It is the northern end of the Golden Strip with Simpsonville and Fountain Inn, a nickname that dates to 1953, when Greenville ran water lines down the corridor. We have been building fences across the Upstate since 2018, more than 55 of them.

Mauldin subdivisions grew up in the 1970s, and so did their fences

Knollwood, off Brooks Road, is a good example of the pattern. It went in during the 1970s, holds 322 single family homes and has the cul-de-sacs and full grown trees you would expect of a neighborhood that age. Forrester Woods came a decade later, 92 lots of traditional houses with a clubhouse and a pool. Neighborhoods like those are what most of Mauldin looks like.

A pressure treated pine privacy fence built in 1988 has now taken nearly forty winters in Cecil clay and about 48 inches of rain a year. The boards usually go first, cupping and splitting, but the fence fails at the posts, three to four inches below grade where the wood stays wet and the air still reaches it. By the time a homeowner calls, the run is typically leaning in two or three places and the gate has dropped.

We see the same story in galvanized chain link of the same vintage: fabric rusted at the ties and sagging between posts that are, more often than not, still perfectly sound. That is the difference between an expensive job and a cheap one, and we check it before we quote rather than after.

What replacing a forty year old fence actually involves

The tear out is the part people underestimate. Old posts were set in concrete, and four decades of Cecil clay settling around those footings means they do not lift out by hand. We dig them, pull them and haul them off rather than snapping the post at grade and leaving the concrete in the ground, because a buried footing is exactly where the new post needs to go.

The second complication is the trees. In 1975 those subdivisions were open ground. Fifty years later the same lots sit under mature oak, maple and poplar, and the fence line runs through roots that were not there when the original posts went in. Sometimes we shift a post to miss a root. Sometimes a section has to step around a trunk that has grown into the line.

The third is the line itself. Where a fence has stood for forty years it has become the working boundary in everyone's mind, whatever the plat says. Rebuilding on the existing line keeps the peace and keeps you inside the setback that was already satisfied. Moving it, even by a foot, starts a conversation with a neighbor. We recommend rebuilding on the same line unless there is a real reason not to, and we say so plainly.

24,724 peopleLived in Mauldin at the 2020 census with a median age of 39.2, and the housing stock is about the same vintage as the residents.

Fewer committees than the rest of the Golden Strip

Most of Mauldin's residential neighborhoods predate the modern covenant. That gives homeowners here noticeably more freedom than their neighbors down I-385 in the newer Simpsonville and Fountain Inn subdivisions, where an architectural committee names the material and the height. In an older Mauldin neighborhood the choice is usually yours, subject to the City of Mauldin's own rules on height and placement.

We still check. A few Mauldin developments do have active associations, and the city sets its own fence rules rather than deferring to Greenville County. We confirm what applies at the quote, so the fence you approve is the fence that gets built.