Fence Company in Five Forks, SC

Anderson Fence Company is a fence company in Five Forks, SC, and most of what we build here goes up on ground that was pasture or planted pine inside living memory. The crossroads takes its name from the five roads that meet there, Woodruff, Batesville, Five Forks, Scuffletown and Bennetts Bridge, about eleven miles east of downtown Greenville.

Five Forks is a census designated place rather than a town, so there is no city hall of its own. The rules that govern your fence come from Greenville County and from your neighborhood covenants, and in practice the covenants are the tighter of the two. We have been building fence across the Upstate since 2018, 55 plus of them, and the Five Forks version of the job always starts with paperwork before it starts with a post hole.

Fencing a place that more than doubled in twenty years

Five Forks counted 8,064 people in 2000, 14,140 in 2010 and 17,737 in 2020. Greenville County grew about 16 percent over that last decade, from 451,225 to 525,534, and Five Forks grew at roughly double the county pace. Almost none of that housing stock is old. What we fence here is mostly a lot a builder graded within the last twenty five years.

That history shows up in the dirt. Grading strips the topsoil and machine traffic packs down what is left, so the auger comes up in raw Cecil clay with very little give in it. Cecil holds its shape, which is good news for a post, but it drains slowly, and a narrow hole in it works like a bucket after a storm. We open the hole wider than the post needs and backfill so water is not sitting against the post at grade for a week.

Before a single hole goes in on a Five Forks lot, we find:

• Irrigation heads and lateral lines, which builders run close to the property line and almost never map for the owner
• Buried dog containment wire, usually laid before the sod went down and invisible from the surface
• The drainage easement across the back of the lot, because a fence sitting inside one can be made to come out later at your cost
• Piped downspout drains and sump discharge lines, which run shallow and are easy to punch straight through
• HVAC pads, meter banks and the gas run from the street to the house
• The actual corner pins, rather than the sprinkler line or mulch bed the last owner treated as the boundary

Getting the architectural committee to yes

Nearly every neighborhood out here has an architectural review committee, and in Five Forks that committee usually decides the fence before we do. Most publish a short list: approved materials, a maximum height, an approved color, and a rule about which way the finished face points. Black aluminum and white vinyl clear those lists more often than anything else, which is a large part of why we install so much of both in this area.

What a committee normally wants attached to the application:

• A plat with the fence line drawn on it, gates included
• Height, material, style and color stated plainly, not described in general terms
• A product photo or a panel detail for the exact profile you picked
• A note of where the run ties into the house and where it stops short of common area
• Whatever neighbor notification the covenants ask for, where they ask for one

We stage the job around that approval rather than around our own calendar. Material gets ordered after the committee signs off, because a rejected color on a delivered vinyl run is an expensive mistake and it should not be your mistake to pay for.

Pool barriers and the part people miss

Plenty of Five Forks back yards have a pool in them, and a pool turns a fence from a preference into a barrier with rules attached. South Carolina builds to the International Residential Code. A residential pool barrier has to stand at least 48 inches, and every gate into it has to be self closing and self latching with the latch set out of a small child's reach.

The details that get missed are the gate swing and the ground under the fence. Gates serving the pool swing away from the water, not toward it. Any gap under a run on a graded yard gets closed off, because a four inch void at the low corner defeats the barrier as completely as a gate somebody propped open.

48 inch minimum barrier heightSet by the residential code South Carolina builds to, along with self closing and self latching gates on every opening into the pool area.