Edmond Fence Contractors, OK
What an Edmond fence crew actually does on site, how to look after the finish in year one, and where the safety code stops being optional.
The job as it happens in your yard
A residential fence is two or three days of noisy, dusty, physical work followed by a year of quiet settling that nobody warns you about. Between the signature and the finished line there is a locate ticket, a truck parked somewhere it probably should not be, a heap of wet red clay on the lawn, and a stretch of hours where your back yard has no fence at all. Knowing the shape of that helps you plan around it rather than being surprised by it.
The rough sequence
- Utility locates are called in and marked, which takes a couple of business days and cannot be skipped.
- Old fence comes down, and usually goes straight into a trailer the same morning.
- The line is strung and holes are augered, spoil piled beside each one.
- Posts are set, plumbed and braced, then left to cure.
- Rails, pickets and gates go up, hardware is adjusted, and the site is raked and cleaned.
What happens after the truck leaves
The fence you look at on the last afternoon is not the fence you will have in June. Concrete keeps gaining strength for weeks. Wood keeps giving up moisture for months, so boards shrink, gaps open, and a few faces cup or check. Clay under the posts swells with a wet spring and pulls back in a dry August, and gates that hung perfectly in September can want a small adjustment by the following one.
What these pages cover
Crew size and how a working day is actually structured, including where the noise and the mess land. What the first twelve months look like and which changes are normal versus which ones are a defect worth a phone call. And pool barriers, where the finished height, the gaps, the latch and the swing direction are dictated by code rather than by preference, and where an inspection is waiting at the end.
None of it is complicated. It is just rarely explained before the work starts, which is when it would have been useful.
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Crew Size and What a Day on Site Looks Like
Who shows up
Two to four people covers most residential runs. A two man crew works fine up to roughly 200 feet with simple gates, though it will stretch into a third day. Three is the common number: one running the auger, two on layout, bracing and material. Four appears when there is heavy demolition, a drive gate, or a schedule squeezed by weather. Crew size tells you about pace, not quality, so a small crew that has worked together for years will often out build a larger one assembled that morning.
Before anyone digs
Locates get called in first. Marks appear as paint and flags across the yard, and the crew is required to hand dig near them. Those marks are the reason a job cannot simply start tomorrow. Gas and communications lines are the ones that matter most in local subdivisions, and irrigation is nobody's responsibility to mark, so if you know where your heads and lines run, flag them yourself before the crew arrives.
Day one
Demolition usually starts around seven and the old fence is often down and loaded before mid morning. Then a string line goes up, hole positions are marked, and the auger runs. Expect a mound of damp clay next to every hole, expect it to be heavier and stickier than dirt has any right to be, and expect some of it to end up on the lawn no matter how carefully the crew works. Posts get set, plumbed, braced and left. In summer that means an early start and a hard stop by mid afternoon, because working steel and hauling posts through a 100 degree afternoon is how people get hurt.
The gap in between
Between the posts going in and the panels going on, your yard is open. This is the part that catches people out. Plan for pets to be inside or leashed, and for gates on the neighbor's side to be the only barrier for a night. Some crews will run temporary fencing on request, and most will happily set the posts and hang the panels on the same visit if the concrete mix allows it, but that is a conversation to have when scheduling, not on the day.
Day two and cleanup
Rails and pickets go up quickly once the line is set, and the visible progress on the second morning is dramatic compared with the first. Gates take longer than their size suggests, because hanging and adjusting them is fussy work. A finished site should have offcuts collected, nails and screws picked up, spoil either hauled or raked flat, and the string line and braces gone. Walk it while the truck is still there, since a missed offcut is a two minute fix that day and a phone call the following week.
Finishing and the First Year of a New Fence
Nothing is finished on the last afternoon
A new fence keeps changing for about a year, and most of what happens in that window is normal. Knowing which changes are expected saves an unnecessary complaint, and more usefully, it tells you which ones are worth raising while the workmanship warranty still applies.
Concrete and posts
Footings reach a workable strength in a day or two and keep gaining for weeks afterward. Leaning hard on a brand new gate post, or hanging a heavy drive gate onto concrete poured that morning, is the classic way to end up with a post that is very slightly out of plumb forever. Give the corners and gate posts a week of gentle treatment.
Wood is still wet when it arrives
Most cedar and treated lumber leaves the yard well above the moisture content it will settle at in an Oklahoma summer. As it dries, several things follow.
- Boards narrow. Gaps of a quarter inch or so opening between pickets that were tight on installation day is shrinkage, not a mistake.
- Some faces cup or bow slightly. A handful across a long run is ordinary; a whole section doing it points at material.
- Fine surface checks appear along the grain, most visibly on the sun facing side.
Any finish should wait until that drying has largely happened, because sealing wet lumber traps the moisture and the coating fails early. The practical test is a few dry weeks and water no longer beading on the surface.
The ground moves too
Expansive clay swells through a wet spring and shrinks back in a hot dry stretch, and a fence line sitting in it rides that movement. Small seasonal changes in how a gate meets its latch are the visible symptom. Hail and the spring wind supply the other half of the first year test, and a fence's first March is a fair trial of how it was built.
Two walks worth doing
At six months
Check every gate for square and latch engagement, put a wrench on the hinge bolts since hardware backs off as wood shrinks around it, and look along the top of the run for any post that has moved out of line with its neighbors.
At twelve months
Repeat that, then look at the base of the posts for soil that has pulled away, at any board that has gone significantly beyond ordinary cupping, and at fasteners for rust streaks, which say something about what was used. Twelve months is also where many workmanship warranties end, so anything you have been meaning to mention should be mentioned before then rather than after.
Movement, shrinkage and weathering are the wood and the ground doing what they do. A leaning post, a rail pulling loose from a post, or a gate that no longer closes at all belongs in a phone call.
Pool Fencing and the Safety Barrier Rules
A pool barrier is a code item, not a design choice
Once there is water on the property, the fence around it stops being a matter of taste and becomes something an inspector measures with a tape. The residential barrier rules adopted across Oklahoma communities follow the same pattern nationally, and the numbers below are the ones that get checked. Confirm the current requirements with the permit office before ordering material, because local amendments exist and they change.
The measurements that get checked
- Height of at least 48 inches, measured on the side away from the pool, at the lowest point of the ground beneath.
- Ground clearance of no more than 2 inches over grass or dirt, and no more than 4 inches where the barrier sits on a solid surface such as a deck or concrete.
- Openings small enough that a 4 inch sphere cannot pass, which rules out most decorative spacing and any picket run with wide gaps.
- No climbable horizontals on the pool side within the lower 45 inches. This is what pushes many aluminum and wood designs to have their rails on the outside face.
- Chain link is treated separately and needs a mesh small enough that it cannot be climbed as a ladder.
Gates are where most inspections fail
A gate in a pool barrier has to be self closing and self latching, and it has to swing away from the water. The latch position matters: mounted on the outside it sits at 54 inches or higher, or if the release is on the pool side of the gate and at least 3 inches below the top, the surrounding area has to be solid with no opening within 18 inches of it. Every one of those details is a common correction on a first inspection, usually because a standard hinge set was fitted rather than a self closing one.
Ground movement and wind
Two local conditions push barrier work in a particular direction. Clay that swells and shrinks moves the ground plane, and a barrier that cleared its 2 inch gap in October can be out of compliance the following summer if the posts were set shallow. Solid panels near a pool also catch the spring wind badly, since the surrounding area is usually open. Aluminum picket and mesh both take that load better than a wood privacy panel does, which is one reason so many pool enclosures around here are open style with privacy handled at the property line instead.
Permits and the walk through
The barrier is generally part of the pool permit rather than a separate one, and it will be inspected before the pool is approved for use. Fitting the gate hardware last and testing it yourself is worth the ten minutes: latch the gate from a standing start, let it go from a few inches open, and confirm it closes and catches on its own every single time.