In the past we have listed some helpful tips and tricks:
- The Ultimate Backyard Fencing Guide
- How to plan for a fence installation – THE CORRECT WAY
- How to Prepare Your Yard for Fence Installation
However we never went over what could go wrong! Today we shall change that fact! Below we list 6 common but costly fencing mistakes!
1. Wrong Kind of Fence for your Home
This is the big one. Choosing the wrong kind of fence is one of the worst fencing mistakes you can make. If your garden fence doesn’t keep large pests out. It is useless. If your dog can escape his fence. It is useless. There are a lot of choices so how do you choose the right one? We dedicated a complete post on this issue: Choose the Right Fence for Your Home. You also might find How to Choose the CORRECT Paint or Stain for your Fence helpful!
2. Unsecured Anchor/Corner Posts
Corner posts are very important to the integrity of a fence. They bear a lot of the pressure, especially when constructing the fence. If you don’t secure them to the ground and support them with braces or other anchors you will slowly see you fence start to cave in. Or your posts might even snap under pressure. And no one wants that. Make sure your corner posts and your gate posts are deeply secured in the ground and properly braced.
3. Underground Utilities
The other day the city was putting up new guard rails on our road. Sometime that morning our internet went out. Then later that day we went out to do some errands and came to the work crew digging every single guard rail post by hand. And lots of new flags dotting the area showing where cable lines were running under the ground. Those guys looked thrilled to be using a manual post hole digger instead of their fancy post drilling machine. So make some calls before you plan your fence. Make sure you won’t be cutting off your neighborhood’s utilities. Make sure you know where your own septic system is. Because that is one fencing mistake you just don’t want to deal with.
4. Wrong Location
So let’s say you’ve spent all your free time fencing in whatever it is you are fencing. You’ve dug in posts. You’ve stretched wire. You’ve cemented in your gate posts and hung the gates. You are super proud of all your hard work. Then you start using the area that is now fenced in and you realized just how inconvenient your gates are. Maybe they are smack dab in the exact area where water and mud gather after storms. Maybe you want to walk you tiller from your shed to the newly fenced in garden and you have to go WAY around to get there. Maybe you didn’t quite plan all scenarios and you now you can’t fit a tractor in through the gate to deliver hay or bush hog or whatever. Before you start any fencing project make sure you have thought out exactly where you need your gates, what they will be used for, and if everything will work as they are supposed to. Because once those gate posts are secured and the fencing stretched…you really don’t want to move your gate. It’s not impossible to do, but it’ll cost you a lot of time and money and cause a headache or two.
5. Incorrectly Spaced Posts
Now let’s say you are crunching numbers for your new fence, and you figure you will save a few bucks by spacing the posts just a little farther then they ought to be spaced. This might work okay for a non-working fence. But let me tell you, if you’ve got an animal inside that pasture, they will be sure to find those weak points in the fence. You don’t want to spend your free time fixing a fence you just put up because the goat knocked it down again. And you don’t want to spend the money to insert new posts to help strengthen the wire. So if your fence needs posts every 8 feet, then put them every 8 feet.
6. Property Lines?
Didi you know that in some places, if a fence is placed on a property line incorrectly and no one contests it, after awhile (years) that fence becomes the new property line? So if you don’t pay attention you could mistakenly give part of your land away to your neighbor. On the flip side, do you want to take your fence down and move it over a few feet when you neighbor complains that you just fenced in part of his yard? Or even worse, you could get a fine for accidentally fencing in public or government owned property. If you are at all unsure as to where your property line is, then call a surveyor. It’ll cost less in the long run.
So there you have it, 6 Fencing Mistakes That Cost You Time and Money. Whether you are planning a fencing project in the future or mid-job, hopefully you can skip making these mistakes and have a strong, well-made fence that will last a life time!