Is your home’s Fence built the Right way? (Part 2: the Fence Pickets)
www.DallasFenceService.com is a leading fence contractor in the Dallas and N Dallas (Richardson, Garland, Plano, Frisco) area. Their experience with fence installations and repairs has seen how other contractors take shortcuts that cheapen the fence homeowners get.
We’re sharing these tips so you can get the very BEST fence for your money, without the disappointment and extra maintenance costs that many homeowners experience 2 years down the road.
The Picket Material— pine, cedar, or synthetic
This is a pretty simple and brief topic. We’re not going to complicate it. You have Cedar, Pine, and also Synthetic pickets (usually made from fiberflass or plastic or mixtures of the two). Now, if you want a waist-high pretty “whitewashed picket” fence look for your front yard, then YES, those synthetic pickets come pre-assembled in sections and are cheap and quick to install. They will work for a merely “decorative” fence.
But what we are focused on is what the vast majority of our customers want — a privacy fence from wood. This fence has pickets typically 6-8 feet high and designed to keep prying eyes, out, as well as be a barrier for pets and intruders. That right there narrows it down to cedar of pine pickets.
Regarding cedar and pine pickets: pine pickets will leak sap — that is just they way all pine wood inherently is and there is no way around it. Pine does not last as long and is harder to stain as the sap will try to push out through any paint or stain. Pine pickets are also more likely to warp from rains over time. Cedar is a better choice in every way. Again, usually a tiny bit more expensive, but does not have the fire issues and longevity issues that pine does. That means that cedar is really the clear choice for your quality fence pickets.
Weather Resistant Fence Pickets
While we’re talking about the material for your fence pickets, we should add that making them weather-resistant should be a no-brainer. Pressure treated lumber may most commonly be used to build decks, fences and more because it is weather resistant. These pickets are treated in a pressurized cylinder (see photo). Better than you painting on a preservative on the surface, this pressure treatment process forces the preservative deep into the cellular structure of the wood, providing long-term protection against rot, fungal decay and termite attack.
Treated fence picket umber can be done at the lumberyard, and your fence contractor has it pre-treated against moisture. Yes, your pickets can be treated after the fact, and they can also be painted and stained, but any fence installer cannot beat the time-savings and price by the lumberyard to pre-treat them for you. In most cases it is just slightly more to get pressure-treated fence pickets, and sometimes it is about the same price. Just do it!
Style of Pickets
There are numerous decorative styles as seen in this illustration that we’re happy to use on your fence. However, most people wanting a privacy fence these days go with “Dog Ear” or just flat, and if they choose flat, they often put a board on top of the fence. This top board accomplishes a couple of things:
• it makes for a protection from rain to the top of the picket — one of the most vulnerable spots (both top and bottom) for moisture to get in an rot the fence picket)
• it acts as another brace to keep the fence strong (in case of high winds for example), and from any possible warping
• but if you are wary of intruders, at the same time it makes for something easy to grab onto to climb over.
Fence Pickets Height
Keep in mind that even a medium-sized dog, if motivated enough, can probably find a way over your 6-foot fence. So for maximum privacy, with a little extra wood materials cost, we like to recommend an 8-foot tall privacy fence.
If your property backs up to an alley, we sometimes have fence customers who opt for 8' tall fence along the alley for extra privacy from random eyes, and to make intruders climbing the fence harder, and then 6' on the sides, next to the neighbors. It all depends on budget, security needs, and your neighbors!
Properly Securing and Installing Fence Pickets
On our fence installations, we give you a seldom-seen advantage. I feel this is the best part of this whole article. Use “ridged” or “ring shank” nails. While screws are very time-consuming to install and while regular nails are cheap and abundant, a smart fence-owner will insist on the advantages of ring shank style nails. As for nail length and material: there are aluminum alloy and stainless steel. We prefer the stainless steel (or galvanized steel) nail. It is simply tougher.
These aluminum alloy fence nails with spiral flutes are better than plain nails, but still not as good as ridged steel nails. This photo shows a fence my actual neighbor had built 2 years ago. I watched it being installed. It DID look great for the first 6 months. But now, those 2 years later, the SHORTCUTS his installers did are obvious!
Nails are not ridged and are coming out and loose all over the place. The stain is sloppy and fading and showing patchy spots very badly. So whatever my neighbor falsely imagined was “saving money” is not in reality. This fence (installed correctly) COULD have lasted him at least 12 years or even more. But as is, it needs to be re-done completely. The fence posts are falling over as well (not shown in photo).
This is to say that the “cheapskate” mindset results in the most expensive way possible to get a privacy fence for your yard. I have not touched the fence to exaggerate the issues, have to say. Also, this shoddy construction is letting his pit bull get OUT of the yard, which has resulted in attacks and TWO lawsuits to date. Again, do your fence wrong, and it becomes needlessly massively costly in many ways!
In Conclusion
I hope you take this advice to heart and choose carefully to work with professional and experience fence contractors in your area. We value service and quality. It costs us money to take time to fix mistakes, so we’d rather do it RIGHT. http://www.DallasFenceService.com/About_Us.html There, we have a form you can fill out to get a quick response from us regarding your fence’s needs.
