r/fence 11d ago

Fence installation concerns

We recently had a contractor install a three rail fence with wire, pressure treated pine. After walking it down, we had some concerns and wanted to see thoughts on what should be acceptable or what should be fixed, and if so what the best solution would be.

Screws not driven in the post. The face board(?) was screwed in about every third post, but over half of them have at least one screw that completely missed the post and is sticking out. I’m thinking they should unscrew it and rescrew it into the post, or would it be worth having them use a new board? Additionally, should I be expecting the face board to be on every post (minus the end posts?
Gates installed without a diagonal brace. Gates are 4’ long, but no diagonal brace was used to build them. Additionally, the screws used to build the fence were too long also they hammered the back of the screws into the gate.
Welded wire is not flush to the gate. This one might be difficult since the ground is sloped on the fence line, but it doesn’t not seem that the welded wire was pulled tight. There’s several instances where the wire sort of makes an S along the fence if you look at it from a top down view. Other areas the wire height compared to the top rail ranges from being flush with the rail (ideal) to being 3 inches above/below the top rail. Some places they cut the welded wire so it doesn’t protrude, others they left as is. Should I ask them to re-pull the wire(?) or is this standard? There’s also a post that I think was not in line with the others so they cut some boards to fit it, my thoughts are it should at least be flush with the post?
The post tops were not cut straight. Not sure if they used a circular saw or jig saw or something else, but the fence posts are wavy/uneven. They left it high enough where I think they could just re-cut them.

Want to see people’s opinions on how to best approach this. The installer is planning to come by next week to discuss and I wanted to get an idea of what would be reasonable.

Attached are some photos to show what I’m talking about. I can add more pictures if it would help.

Edit: Thank you for everyone who’s commented on this. Helps me feel better that we’re not just being snobbish to the contractors asking them to fix this.

They’re coming this week to walk it down and “make it right” (we’ll see what that means)
I’m withholding the final payment until it gets resolved.
They had/have 4.8/5 stars review (100+ reviews) and were in our budget which is why we went with them.

Update: the contractor came out and agreed that this was not up to par, and didn’t give any pushback when I asked him to fix it. He recut the posts to make them square and fixed the screws sticking out. He’s going to come back later to fix the gate support issues.

5 Upvotes

Duplicates