Getting a fence for your home or business isn’t a complicated process, but there are some basic steps you can take to make it run more smoothly. After careful and planned financing for your fence, the first order of business is deciding on fence style. Shortly after that, figure out if your town or city requires any sort of permit to build your fence. Once those two things are out of the way, it’s then a simple matter of deciding on the fence company to go with or answering the question of whether or not to self-install. Let’s visit each of these steps in more detail.
A fence style that fits your needs and wants
While it might be tempting to skip this step and focus on the later ones, dwelling on fence style now rather than later can help you set your pricing goals in the following steps. Of course, different fencing styles have different pricing ranges, and the style that best fits your needs might not best fit your wants. Both needs and wants should be satisfied, however, and your primary focus this step should be in balancing the two so that you can decide on the best possible style for your new fence.
For your reference, here’s some fencing styles and the needs that they typically fit:
Chain Link Fence
- Most affordable for large enclosures and for keeping small farm animals or pets inside
Ornamental Fence
- Great for maintaining the look and feel of housing and professional settings
Vinyl Fence
- Complete visual obscurity for increased privacy and easier fence maintenance
Wood Fence
- Large farm animal enclosures and preserving the look of rustic living spaces
Make sure you’re permitted to build a fence
This is probably the step that occurs less to first-time fence builders. If you live in the city limits, chances are that your local government has some sort of rule or ordinance on fence enclosures that would be valuable to know. And that doesn’t mean that rural areas are free from fence building restrictions – to be safe, do your homework and be 100% sure your building site is legal before you start looking for a fencing company.
Decide on a fence company
While we certainly hope that you’ll choose us as your fence company – figuring out a company that best fits your needs should be your primary concern on this step. That means shopping around and determining who has the experience to recommend the right fencing for the job. Fitting a company to your expected price range is also a factor, but it should come second to securing a knowledgeable company that is going to focus on satisfying the customer rather than maximizing profits.
This step is also important for better answering the question of self-install that comes after it. A professional fence installer is usually a better match for buying than a fence vendor.
Self-install or professional install
We’ve talked about this subject in more detail in a previous post, but it goes without saying that installation is a key concern involved in the fence buying process. We think that investing in a professional fence installation pays for itself by increasing the lifespan of your fence and reducing overall fence repair costs.
Once you’re done with that last step, you’re very close to deciding when to build your fence rather than how to. Again, we cannot stress enough the importance of planning out your fence purchase and install carefully. If you take the time to decide some of this stuff right now, you’ll thank yourself later when one poorly planned step could cost you in dollars and cents.
