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What makes a timber fence look premium
Most fences are palings nailed to a frame, and they look like it. The fences people stop to look at are decided by a handful of details: how the posts sit, how the rails are built, how the boards are spaced and how the finish goes on. Here's what goes into ours, on two very different jobs.
Two fences, two standards
Torbay: 40 m of our signature fence, painted, on a front yard facing the street.
Mission Bay: about 25 m of capped paling rebuilt, plus an 8 m return with a gate, left raw.
Torbay: the signature fence
The front yard at Torbay got a new front boundary fence, two side fences and a privacy screen at the end of the new patio: 40 m in total. The side fences are capped paling; the front is what we call our signature fence.
It's built from dressed timber throughout: 90 × 19 H3.2 pine slats, dressed smooth and set vertically at 10 mm spacing, on dressed 90 × 90 posts and 90 × 45 rails. The posts sit 100 mm proud of the fence and stay exposed, so the run reads as a series of individual bays rather than one flat wall. The rail is doubled, with a 100 mm gap between the two and three vertical blocks spaced at 100 mm. That gap and those blocks create a negative-detail pattern, and it's that detail that makes the fence read as premium.
The front fence is off-white and the side fences are black. The paint system is a primer and Resene Lumbersider with the CoolColour additive, sprayed rather than brushed, for a smooth even coat across the grain and into every edge, and it's faster over 40 m of fence. Resene's CoolColour technology uses pigments that reflect more of the sun's heat, so the paint and the timber run cooler. That reduces heat-related movement; it doesn't eliminate it.
6 weeks on site, for the whole front yard
Mission Bay: a long fence line, set out straight
At Mission Bay about 25 m of old fence had failed under creeping fig and was buried in it. It came down completely, the growth was cleared into a bin, and it was rebuilt to our capped paling standard, with an 8 m return and a pedestrian gate on stainless hardware to fully enclose the property.
The spec is 100 × 100 H4 posts bolted onto a low existing core-filled block wall, 100 × 50 H3.2 rails, 140 × 45 H3.2 capping and 150 × 25 H3.2 palings, fixed with galvanised nails and screws, and left raw.
Kevin's view of the hard part: setting a long fence line straight. It's not easy on a run that length, because every millimetre shows. The new line was set out fresh rather than following the old one.
3 weeks on site, for the whole job
A smaller one: the Torbay puppy fence
Not every fence is a front boundary. On the Torbay deck job we also built a 4 m long, 1.5 m high capped paling fence with a gate on the far side of the house, to keep the owners' new puppy inside the property. The owners' review mentions it by name.
What actually decides it
The posts. Hidden posts make a flat wall. Exposed posts, standing proud, make bays, and bays give a long fence rhythm.
The rail. A single rail is structure. A doubled rail with spacer blocks is structure and detail at the same time.
The spacing. Slats at an even 10 mm gap let light and air through and read as deliberate. Uneven gaps are the first thing the eye catches.
The line. On a long run, the set-out matters more than the timber. A string line and patience beat following an old fence that has wandered.
The finish. Sprayed paint covers evenly into every edge. Left raw, as at Mission Bay, the timber weathers naturally.
Pool fencing is its own thing. Barriers around pools have their own rules. We build timber barriers ourselves; glass and aluminium go to specialist contractors like Profit NZ, who install and certify their own work. See pool fencing and consents in Auckland.
Where we fit
We build boundary fences, screens and gates in timber, from a capped paling run to the full signature fence, and we set out and finish them ourselves.