Fence styles

On a fence, the material is the style

With railings the look comes from the bar pattern. With a fence it comes almost entirely from the boards, so this tool leads with the material rather than with a style picker.

• Featheredge, built as closeboard. Tapered boards, each lapping over the last, fixed to arris rails on site. Heavy, stiff, and repairable a board at a time.
• Slatted. Horizontal boards with a deliberate shadow gap between them. Contemporary, and the gap is what stops it reading as a flat wall.
• Composite. Slats in a material that does not need painting and does not rot. More expensive up front and much less work afterwards.
• Softwood and oak. The same construction in two very different timbers, and the difference in how they weather is more visible after three years than on day one.

Closeboard against panels, which is the real decision

Panels are quicker and cheaper, and they fail as a unit. A gale takes a whole panel and you replace a whole panel.

Closeboard is built in place, board by board on arris rails. It is stiffer, considerably heavier, and a damaged board is replaced individually rather than triggering a new section. On an exposed boundary or a long run that difference pays for itself; on a short sheltered garden divider it usually does not.

Hit-and-miss, and why a solid fence is a sail

Boards fixed alternately to each side of the rails give you no clear line of sight through the fence while letting air pass through it.

That matters more than it sounds. A solid fence is a sail: the wind has to go over it, and the load ends up in the posts and the concrete. Hit-and-miss lets the wind through and takes a great deal of that load out, which is how it survives on exposed boundaries where solid panels do not.

It also looks the same from both sides, which is a genuinely useful property on a shared boundary where the "good side" question would otherwise come up.

The height limit is lower than people think

Two metres above ground level without planning permission, and only one metre where the fence adjoins a highway, which includes a footpath running along the road.

Worth doing the arithmetic before ordering. A 1.8 metre panel sitting on a 150mm gravel board is 1.95 metres, which is inside the limit but not by much, and any ground level made up underneath it eats the rest.

Check whose fence it is first

The convention that the posts face into the owner's garden is a habit rather than a rule of law, and it is wrong often enough to cause real arguments. The deeds are the answer.

It is a five minute check and it is considerably cheaper than taking down a fence that turns out to belong to somebody else.

What this gives you and what it does not

The drawing is dimensionally real: the run, the height, the panel and post setting out are worked from actual millimetres rather than being a texture stretched over your photo. So the picture is a fair impression and the numbers underneath it are worth taking to a quote.

What it will not do is tell you about your ground. Fence posts fail at the ground line, and whether that happens in five years or twenty depends on the post length, the depth, the concrete and the drainage under it. The fencing calculator works those out properly, including the extra post nobody remembers and the fact that a post is half again as long as the fence is tall.

Your photo is opened and drawn inside your browser, and the picture you download is put together on your own device. Nothing is uploaded and there is no account.