Wood Fence Installation in Anderson, SC

Wood fence installation is still the most requested job we quote in Anderson County, and the reason has not changed in eight years: nothing else buys you a solid six foot screen for the same money. The tradeoff is that wood is the only fence material that keeps changing after we leave.

We build cedar and pressure treated pine on site, board by board, across Anderson County and Greenville County plus Easley and Clemson. Privacy, picket, shadowbox and board on board. Every quote is done on your property, for free, with no deposit taken.

What our wood fence installation includes

A wood fence quote from us is for a finished fence. The posts, the concrete, the hardware and the cleanup are inside the number, not added to it later.

• On-site measure, a walk of the line and a layout that accounts for slope before any lumber is ordered
• Utility locate request placed before the first hole is dug
• Post holes dug wide and deep for the height of the fence, rather than to one depth for every job
• Ground contact rated posts set in concrete, with the top of each footing crowned so water sheds away from the wood
• Two rails on a four foot fence and three on a six foot, fastened to the post rather than toe nailed and hoped for
• Pickets cut and fitted on site so the top line runs straight instead of following the dirt
• Hot dipped galvanized or coated fasteners throughout, because bare steel bleeds black streaks down the boards
• Gate posts upsized and set deeper than line posts, with hinges rated for the weight of the leaf
• Tear out and disposal of whatever fence is there now, including filling the holes it leaves
• Cleanup at the end of the job, with the clay spoil carried off rather than left in mounds to bake hard

Cap rail, a trim board, a lattice top and a stain package are all quoted as separate line items, so you can see what each one costs before you decide you want it.

When a wood fence is the right call

Wood is not the default answer. It is the right answer in a specific set of situations, and we say so when it is not one of them.

• You want a solid six foot screen and vinyl or steel panel sits above the budget
• Your architectural committee specifies wood, which is common in the older parts of Anderson, Belton and Williamston
• You want to stain the fence to match trim or a deck rather than live with a factory color
• The run is long, and wood keeps the cost per foot sane at full height
• You want a fence you can fix one board at a time instead of hunting for a matching panel
• The line has curves, steps or an awkward corner, and a site built fence follows ground that prefabricated panels will not

Wood is the wrong call if you know you will never wash or seal it. Left bare in this climate it still stands, but it grays, cups and checks, and it looks tired long before it is structurally finished. If that describes you honestly, vinyl or aluminum will make you happier, and we install both.

Cedar or pressure treated pine

Two species cover almost every wood fence in the Upstate. They are not interchangeable, and the difference shows up in year three rather than on the day we finish.

Board patterns

The pattern matters as much as the species, because it decides whether the fence is still private after the wood shrinks.

• Standard privacy: boards butted edge to edge on one side of the rail. The cheapest solid screen and the one most likely to gap
• Shadowbox: boards alternating front and back of the rail, finished from either yard, with enough airflow to let Upstate wind through instead of fighting it
• Board on board: boards overlapped rather than butted, so shrinkage eats into the overlap instead of opening daylight
• Picket: spaced boards at three or four feet for front yards, gardens and anywhere visibility rules apply
• Cap and trim: a top rail over the pickets with a trim board under it, which stiffens the run and hides the cut ends

Board on board costs more because it uses more boards. It is the upgrade we push hardest, because the most common complaint about a two year old wood fence is not that it fell over, it is that you can see through it.

How we install a wood fence

The order of operations is fixed, and it is worth knowing when you are comparing two quotes that read the same on paper.

1. Walk the line with you, confirm the corners, and settle where the gates go and how wide they need to be
2. Place the utility locate request, then flag anything private we could hit, such as irrigation heads and landscape lighting wire
3. String the line and mark post centers, deciding where the run steps and where it follows the grade
4. Dig each hole wide enough for concrete to grip the post on all four sides, not just wide enough to drop it in
5. Set posts in concrete, plumbed to a string rather than by eye, and crown the top of every footing
6. Leave the concrete to cure before anything is hung on the posts or pulled against them
7. Run the rails, checking that each one sits at the same height along the length of the run
8. Fit the pickets to a line, held clear of the dirt so the end grain is not standing in mud
9. Hang the gates, set the hardware, cut the tops if the design calls for it, then clean up and walk the finished fence with you

A typical back yard is two to three days on site, split so the concrete gets time between the posts going in and the boards going on. Rock in the post line is the usual reason a job here runs long.

What Anderson County ground does to a wood fence

The post fails before the pickets. Nearly every tired wood fence we are called out to look at in Anderson County has boards that are still sound sitting on a post that has gone at the ground line. That is not bad luck. That is the soil.

The Piedmont sits on Cecil series red clay, a kaolinitic soil mapped across more than 10 million acres of the southeastern Piedmont. It holds its shape well, which is useful, but it drains slowly, which is not. A post hole in that clay fills up and stays full. Add roughly 48 inches of rain a year and a humid subtropical climate with no dry season to let anything recover, and the few inches of post either side of grade spend their whole life wet.

Two things follow. First, the wood below grade has to carry a ground contact rating rather than a general above ground one, because South Carolina sits in one of the heaviest termite pressure zones the residential code maps. Second, depth is not about frost. Frost depth is shallow in the Upstate, so we set post depth against wind load and saturated clay instead. A six foot solid fence is a sail, and a sail standing in soft wet clay needs a deeper, wider footing than a picket fence ever will.

10 million acres of Cecil clayCovers the southeastern Piedmont, including the ground under your yard. It holds its shape and drains slowly, which is exactly the wrong pair of traits for a wood post.

What drives the price of a wood fence

Lumber is priced by the board, so a wood quote moves with things that are easy to overlook when you are staring at a per foot figure.

• Total linear feet, which sets the floor for everything else
• Height, since a six foot fence needs a third rail and half again the picket lumber of a four foot
• Species, with cedar sitting above pressure treated pine on every run
• Board pattern, because board on board uses noticeably more lumber than a butted privacy fence
• Post size and depth, which we set against the height of the fence and how exposed the run is
• Gate count and gate width, with a double drive gate costing well above a walk gate
• Slope, which forces either stepped sections or racked rails and a lot more cutting
• Buried surprises in the post line: rock, tree roots or an old footing
• Whether an old fence has to come out first
• Extras such as cap rail, trim board, lattice top or a stain package

The cheapest version of this job is a flat rectangular back yard in pressure treated pine, six foot standard privacy, one walk gate. Change the species, add a slope and a drive gate and the number moves a long way. We would rather put both figures in front of you on site than quote a per foot rate over the phone that we have to walk back.

Staining a wood fence in a 48 inch rain climate

Staining is the cheapest thing you can do to a wood fence and the first thing most people skip. In a climate that delivers about 48 inches of rain a year against a national average of 38, with hot humid summers and no dry season, bare wood takes it from both water and UV at the same time.

• Pressure treated pine has to dry before it will hold a finish, and here that usually means waiting a season, sometimes longer
• Cedar can be sealed sooner, but it still has to be clean and dry when you do it
• Wash first, let it dry all the way through, then seal. Stain over mildew and you lock the mildew in under the finish
• Pigmented stains outlast clear sealers, because the pigment is the part that blocks UV
• Do the south and west facing runs first. They take the most sun and they fail first
• Plan on redoing it every few years rather than treating it as a one time job

Here is the honest limit of it. Stain protects the pickets and rails, which are the parts you can replace cheaply. It does nothing for the post below grade, which is the part that actually ends the fence. So stain because you want the boards to last and the fence to look right, not because you believe it makes the posts permanent. If the fence is already up and you would rather not spend a weekend on it, we do staining and sealing as its own job.