Central Ohio, community by community
Fence service areas around Columbus and central Ohio
Four communities have a page of their own here: Upper Arlington, Worthington, New Albany and Pickerington. Each stands for a different set of problems a fence line runs into, and most yards in this metro resemble one of the four.
What changes from one neighborhood to the next is the yard itself. A lot may be a flat rectangle or a pie-shaped wedge on a cul-de-sac, and the wedge eats more footage than anyone expects. Grade decides whether panels get stepped down a slope or racked to follow the ground. A mature canopy puts roots in the post line and limits how far a gate can swing. Drainage easements cross the back of many subdivision lots, and a fence sitting in one may have to come out later. And where covenants apply, an association often has a say over height, color, style and which side of the boards faces out — a separate approval from zoning, on its own schedule.
What does not change is the ground under it or the weather over it: the same clay-heavy till, the same slow drainage, the same winter of freezing and thawing working at every post. So the method barely moves as you cross a municipal line, and that work is described on the services pages instead of four more times here.
Fencing an Upper Arlington yard, from the trees down to the gate
Most fence work in Upper Arlington is replacement work. The streets were platted generations ago, the houses have settled into their lots, and the trees have had decades to grow into whatever the back yard used to be. That changes the job. Nobody here is staking a line across bare graded dirt on a new cul-de-sac. A crew is working around root systems, a detached garage, a side yard barely wider than a wheelbarrow, and an older fence that has to come out first. The walk-through matters more than the material list.
Fences in Worthington, from the old village lots to the newer subdivisions
Worthington reads as one place and builds like two. Inside the old village grid the lots run narrow and deep, the houses sit close to the street, and the back half of the yard sits under a canopy that predates any thought of a fence. A mile out, the subdivisions that filled in around that core have wider frontages, younger trees and rear lines a machine graded in an afternoon. A layout that works beautifully on one of those streets is the wrong plan on the other, and the difference shows up in the first twenty minutes of walking the yard.
Fence installation in New Albany, where approval comes before the order
A fence in New Albany is two projects stacked together. There is the fence -- the line, the posts, the panels, the gates -- and there is the approval that comes first. This is a planned community, and what you add to the outside of the house is reviewed against the standards written for your neighborhood before anything is ordered. Homeowners who learn that late lose weeks, and sometimes a material order. Start there instead and you usually get the fence you pictured, on a calendar you can plan around. What follows is about that sequence, and about what long, level lots do to a fence line.
Fencing in Pickerington: flat clay lots, covenants and long rear lines
Pickerington sits southeast of Columbus, mostly in Fairfield County, and the streets here are young -- subdivision after subdivision built out over the last few decades on flat farm ground. That history shows up in every fence job. The clay was stripped, pushed around and packed down by machines, so it digs nothing like undisturbed ground. Lots sit level enough that water leaves slowly, and most back yards hold one wet corner after a storm. Almost every neighborhood carries recorded covenants with something to say about fences. None of that stops a good fence; it decides how the line gets laid out.
Those four pages are not a service boundary. If your street is somewhere else in the metro — Hilliard, Gahanna, Grove City, Westerville, Dublin, Powell, Bexley, Reynoldsburg, Canal Winchester or anywhere else in Franklin County — the fence is the same fence and the ground is the same ground.
Open whichever page looks most like your property, or skip the reading and send the address with a rough footage, the height you have in mind and photos taken from either end of the line.
Talk through your site
Start with the address, what you want done, and a few photographs of the area, including anywhere water sits after a heavy rain.