Fencing & Walls

Close-board — sometimes called featherboard — is the default for good reason: solid, no gaps that open up as timber dries, and legal to 1.8m at the rear of most properties. Slatted timber screens and composite panels give you the same privacy with a more contemporary face, at a higher cost per metre. Where a garden backs onto a busy road, acoustic panels do a job that ordinary fencing simply cannot. Height limits get checked against your plot at the survey.

Permitted development allows 2m at the rear of a residential property and 1m where the boundary meets a public highway. That holds across Berkshire, SL4 and SL5 included. It stops holding if the property is listed, sits in a conservation area, or has had permitted development rights removed by a planning condition — all three of which we check on your address at the survey, not after the posts are in.

Fifteen to twenty-five years before the boards need replacing, on concrete posts and gravel boards. The posts are what decides it. Timber posts rot at the ground line and take the whole run with them; concrete posts do not, which is the single biggest reason our fences outlast the cheaper quote you will have been given. We use factory pressure-treated FSC timber throughout — treatment brushed on after cutting does not penetrate the same way.

Yes, and we will tell you if that is the sensible option. Individual panels, posts or sections are all replaceable. What we look at during the survey is the condition of what is staying: replacing three panels next to five that will fail next winter is a false economy, and you should hear that from us before you pay for it rather than after.