Chain Link Fence Installation in Greenville, SC

Chain link fence installation in Greenville looks straightforward on a map and rarely is on the ground. The city counted 70,720 residents in 2020, and a large share of them live inside the ring of neighborhoods laid out between 1900 and the 1940s, where lots are deep and narrow, side yards are tight and the street trees have had a century to fill the ground with roots. A post line through that is a hand dug post line.

The other half of the city is newer and easier, open subdivisions out past Pelham Road where a machine works the whole run in a morning. Both get quoted the same way, free and on site, because the only honest way to price a Greenville yard is to stand in the side yard and see what the fence has to get past. We have been building across the Upstate since 2018, more than 55 fences, with a 4.7 star average from 24 Google reviews.

Hand digging a chain link post line under Greenville hardwoods

The oldest residential blocks in the city, North Main, Augusta Road, Alta Vista and Overbrook among them, were planted with oak and maple when the streets went in. A century later the structural roots run well past the drip line, straight through the strip of grass where a fence belongs. An auger that catches a two inch root either stalls or tears it out, and the tree pays for that three summers later.

Chain link has one real advantage here over everything else we build. A line post is pipe, not a four by four, so the hole it needs is narrower and the odds of threading between roots are better. Where a post still lands on one, we move it six or eight inches and take the difference up in the rail span. Nobody standing in the yard sees the offset and the oak keeps its root.

Access decides the rest. Side yards in Nicholtown, Sterling and the older Augusta Road blocks are often under ten feet, sometimes under six, with a gate or a hedge at the street end. Rolled fabric and loose pipe go down a path like that on a shoulder. On a lot of close-in Greenville lots, chain link is simply the only fence that can physically reach the back yard without dismantling something first.

Where black coated chain link earns its price in Greenville

Inside the city limits a residential front yard fence is capped at three feet, and chain link facing a street draws more scrutiny than any other material we install. Seven local historic districts overlay parts of the older city, and anything visible from the street inside one of them is reviewed on appearance. We check the zoning and the overlay before we price a street-facing run, because finding out afterward is the expensive order of operations.

That pushes nearly every Greenville chain link job behind the house line, and it pushes whatever still shows from the road to black. Black vinyl coated fabric under a mature canopy genuinely disappears. Silver reads as a wall of wire from fifty feet. On a corner lot where two sides of the fence are seen from the street, black is worth what it adds.

On an interior lot, behind the house, with neighbors fenced on both sides already, galvanized is still the sensible buy and we will tell you so. Paying a premium to hide a fence nobody outside your family will ever look at is not an upgrade.

3 feet in a front yardIs the cap on most residential front yard fences inside the city of Greenville, which is why almost every chain link run we build here starts behind the house.

What makes a narrow Greenville lot cost more per foot

A deep narrow lot carries more fence per square foot of yard than a square one, and more of the expensive kind. Terminal, corner and gate posts are heavier pipe set in more concrete than a line post, and a long thin rectangle puts those at closer intervals relative to the total footage. Two yards of identical area can sit a few hundred dollars apart on that alone.

Gates are the second thing. A back yard reached only down a side yard needs a walk gate wide enough for a mower, a wheelbarrow or a trash cart, and on a six foot side yard that gate has to swing somewhere. We size it and hang it where the arc clears the ground and the wall, and we check that on the actual slope rather than assuming flat.

Time is the third. Hand digging is slower than augering, and on a hundred year old block we plan for what is buried: clothesline footings, a brick walk under the sod, concrete from a fence that came out in the 1980s. None of that is unusual in Greenville and none of it should arrive as a change order halfway through the job.

What a chain link fencing job in Greenville includes

A Greenville chain link quote covers the whole line, including the parts an older lot quietly adds to the work.

• A walk of the line with you, with root plates and side yard access checked before anything is ordered
• Utility locate request, plus marking of irrigation and low voltage lines common on older lots
• Hand digging wherever a post falls inside a mature root plate
• Terminal, corner and gate posts set heavier than the line posts, in crowned concrete
• Galvanized or black vinyl coated fabric, machine tensioned and tied at the correct interval
• Walk gates sized to pass a mower down a narrow side yard
• Tear out and haul away of an old fence, buried footings included
• Post hole spoil raked out rather than left in piles on a small city lawn

The full breakdown of materials, process and pricing factors lives on our chain link fence installation page. This page covers what changes in Greenville.