Condition check
Repair or replace? Check your fence
Nine questions you can answer from your own back yard in about two minutes. You will get an honest classification and what to do next — including "nothing, it is fine," which is a real result here and the one we return most often.
Go outside first if you can. The first question needs you to push on a few posts.
1. Push hard on the top of a few posts. Do any move at the ground line?
2. Is any part of the fence leaning?
3. At ground level, is there rot, rust, or crumbling?
4. Roughly how old is the fence?
5. Is the fence currently holding anything in — pets, children, or livestock?
6. Does the fence enclose a swimming pool?
7. How are the gates working?
8. Have you had it repaired in the last two years?
9. How exposed is the fence to wind?
Why the post test matters most
Everything above ground is replaceable cheaply. Pickets, rails, and panels come off and go back on. Posts are different — they are set in concrete below grade, and replacing one means digging out the old footing, which is most of the labor on any fence job. That is why a fence with good posts and shabby pickets is worth repairing, and a fence with tidy pickets and moving posts usually is not.
Around here posts fail for three reasons: rot or rust at the ground line, movement from freeze-thaw where they were not set deep enough to begin with, and posts that were bottomed on top of the hardpan instead of through it. Rupert runs from −34 °F to 104 °F, which is a lot of cycling, and a post set at the frost minimum under a six-foot privacy panel was under-specified on day one. See how deep posts need to go here and why the auger stops at two feet.
If the answer is replacement
Ask every bidder to write down four things: post depth, post size, concrete volume per post, and whether old footings are being extracted or left in the ground. Those four are the entire difference between a fence that stands straight in ten years and one that does not — and they are invisible once the fence is up, which is exactly why the cheapest bid can afford to be cheapest. Our removal and replacement page covers what proper extraction involves.
Questions
About this check
When should a fence be replaced instead of repaired?
The rough test is the posts. If more than about a third of them move when you push hard at the top, replacement is usually the better spend — posts are the expensive part of any fence, and patching around failing ones means paying labor twice. Isolated damage, one or two posts, or a single wind-blown section is worth repairing.
Will this tool just tell me to buy a new fence?
No. It returns "in good shape" and "maintenance, not a project" for fences that do not need work, and those are the two most common results for fences under ten years old. We would rather you trusted the answer than acted on it once.
Is this the same as an inspection?
No. It is a structured version of the questions we would ask you on the phone, and it is only as good as what you can see from your own yard. Some things — how deep the posts were originally set, what is happening below grade — can only be checked in person. The on-site look is free.
Get a free on-site estimate
A real person answers. We walk the line with you, check the ground, and give you a written per-foot price — at no charge and with no pressure.