Custom Wood Fences in Chesapeake, VA

Board-on-board, privacy and picket wood fencing across Chesapeake | An owner-run family shop, Class A licensed, with the work overseen by an owner

Most of our Chesapeake woodwork is ordinary backyard building. In South Norfolk, it starts somewhere else, with the design guidelines' preference for keeping a historic fence, which makes repair a real branch of this trade rather than a consolation.

The South Norfolk Historic District design guidelines open on retention. They call for retaining historic fences, walls and hedges, and only then turn to what new fencing should look like. Vertical wood pickets are among the appropriate materials for new fencing, and the wood may be painted or stained.

Most fence pages, ours included, are written for people who have decided to replace something. In South Norfolk, that decision has a step in front of it. If an old wood fence is standing and contributes to the street, the guidelines would prefer it be repaired rather than replaced, and a certificate of appropriateness is required for most exterior work visible from a paved public street.

The district also sets its own fence dimensions, and they are tighter than the citywide ones. In a front yard, the ceiling is four feet, and the fence has to be at least fifty percent open, so a solid privacy run across the front is not the conversation here. A secondary front yard can take privacy fencing up to six feet with a five-foot setback. These were revised recently enough that the current figures are worth confirming with the city; a neighbor's memory of what was allowed may be out of date.

For a homeowner, that is better news than it sounds. Repairing a historic wood fence is often entirely feasible: posts can be reset, individual pickets replaced in kind, a sagging gate rebuilt on its original hinges. That is carpentry, and it is the part of this trade our family came up in.

Where a run is genuinely past saving, the guidelines point to vertical wood pickets, and we build them to match what was there, working from the original profile. You submit the certificate application; the measured drawings, the profile detail, and the material specification that go with it are ours to prepare.

Most of Chesapeake is not South Norfolk, and on those streets a wood fence is a wood fence. Board-on-board where you want no gaps as the boards shrink, solid privacy where screening is the whole point, picket where the front of the house is doing the talking. Species, sealing and the difference between the styles are set out on our main wood fencing page.

The thing worth carrying over from the historic side of the city is the repair habit. Plenty of fences we are called to replace across Chesapeake have ten good years left in the boards and a footing problem at three posts, and we will tell you when that is what we are looking at.

Chesapeake drains through canals and ditches rather than downhill, which is why so many yards here hold water after the rain has stopped elsewhere. A wood fence meets that at the ground line, where a board end and a post base can stay damp for weeks at a time, and that is where rot starts rather than at the top where people look for it.

Two responses are worth discussing at the estimate. Lifting the bottom of a fence clear of the standing ground is a build-time decision, and it changes where the lowest board spends the winter. And on a run that crosses a genuinely wet stretch, building that section so it can be replaced on its own later is sensible planning.

The canals and ditches that drain the city also mean a fair number of Chesapeake lots carry a public drainage easement. Where a wood run has to sit near one, we read the plat first, because timber is straightforward to rebuild and considerably less straightforward to move.

Wood Questions, Chesapeake Specifics

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