Fence Repair
Repair in Indiana.

The deep dive

Repair or replace: the honest math

I’m Dave Rogers, owner-operator at Get Fenced! in Lafayette — licensed and insured. Half the repair calls we get shouldn’t be repairs, and a fair number of “I probably need a whole new fence” calls shouldn’t be replacements. Here’s the framework I use standing in your yard, so you can run it yourself before you ever call anyone:

• One or two bad boards, panel, or a sagging gate → repair, always. This is an hour or two of work with matching material. Anyone who quotes you a new fence off a broken picket is selling, not solving.
• Leaning sections but solid boards → it’s the posts, and it’s fixable. Nine times out of ten in Tippecanoe County, a leaning fence is a failed concrete-set post that clay heave pushed out of plumb — not a broken fence. We pull the bad posts, drive galvanized steel in their place below the frost line, and re-hang the existing sections. The fence you already paid for gets another decade.
• More than a third of the posts failing → run the replacement math. Post-by-post surgery has a crossover point. When a 150-foot run needs ten new posts, re-hanging weathered panels on new steel costs enough that new sections start making sense. We’ll price both and show you the numbers side by side.
• Rot at the bottom rail line across the whole fence → replacement territory. When the structure is going everywhere at once, patching chases the failure around the yard. We’ll say so plainly and you can decide on your timeline, not ours.

The estimate is free either way, and “repair it, don’t replace it” is an answer we give constantly. A repair customer who trusts us is a replacement customer in ten years — that math works fine for me.

What Indiana weather actually does to fences

Around Lafayette, fences don’t die of old age — they die of specific, predictable failure modes. Knowing which one you have tells you what the fix costs:

• Frost heave (the leaning fence). Our clay swells when it freezes and grips anything buried in it. Concrete-set posts act like pistons — every freeze-thaw cycle (Lafayette averages 30+ per winter) ratchets them up and out. By March the fence leans and the gate won’t latch. The fix is driven steel below the 32–36 inch frost line; the physics is covered in our guide to fence post depth in Indiana clay.
• Ground-line rot (the snapped post). Wood posts rot where wood, water, and soil meet — right at grade, hidden inside the concrete collar. The post looks fine and then a 40-mph gust snaps it clean at the ground. If one post in your fence has done this, its siblings set the same year are on the same clock.
• Wind racking (the parallelogram gate). Long privacy runs facing open ground work their fasteners loose over years of gusts, and gates sag out of square. Re-squaring a gate with a tension kit and fresh hardware is one of the cheapest, most satisfying repairs we do.
• Storm strikes (the flattened section). Straight-line winds and falling limbs take out discrete sections. This is the classic same-day repair if the posts survived — and an insurance conversation if they didn’t (more below).
• UV and moisture cycling (the gray, cupped boards). Cosmetic until it isn’t. Boards that haven’t seen stain in 5+ years cup, check, and start shedding fasteners. Board-by-board replacement plus a stain cycle buys years; we’ll tell you when it’s past that.

Real repair pricing, straight up

Most companies hide pricing until someone’s standing in your driveway with a clipboard. We don’t — same policy on repairs as on our full pricing breakdown. Every yard is different, but these are honest working ranges for the Lafayette area:

• Board/picket replacement: $8–$15 per board installed, material-matched. Small-job minimum applies.
• Post replacement (the big one): $150–$275 per post — pull the failed post, drive galvanized steel to depth, re-hang the existing sections. Concrete-set post extraction on the high end; clean pulls on the low end.
• Gate re-square and re-hang: $125–$250 including anti-sag hardware, hinge replacement, and latch alignment. New gates and openers live on our gates page.
• Storm section rebuild: $30–$55 per linear foot for wood privacy sections rebuilt on surviving or replaced posts, depending on material and access.
• Chain link repairs: $95–$200 for most mesh patches, rail replacements, and tension work. Chain link is the most repairable fence there is.
• Leaning-fence triage visit: free with any quoted repair. We’ll tell you which posts are gone, which are fine, and which are borderline — with the borderline ones priced as options, not padded into the quote.

Same-day completion is the norm for anything that doesn’t need special-order material. Cedar boards, standard vinyl panels, chain link mesh, and steel posts ride on the truck.

Storm damage and insurance claims

After a derecho or ice storm rolls through Tippecanoe County, two things happen: every fence company’s phone rings, and homeowners start guessing about insurance. The short version:

• Homeowner’s policies commonly cover fence storm damage under “other structures” coverage, minus your deductible. Whether a claim makes sense depends on the repair cost vs. that deductible — a $400 section fix under a $1,000 deductible isn’t a claim, it’s a repair.
• We document either way. Photos of the damage, a written scope, and an itemized estimate on letterhead — what adjusters want to see, provided at no charge with the estimate.
• Don’t wait on the adjuster to make the yard safe. Securing a downed section so dogs stay in and kids stay out doesn’t void anything; we do temporary standups all the time and fold the cost into the final repair.
• Neighbor’s tree, your fence? Generally your policy handles your fence regardless of whose tree fell — the “act of God” rule surprises people. Your agent has the final word on your policy.

The repairs we won’t do (and what we say instead)

A repair that fails in a year costs you twice and costs me a reputation. So we skip the bandaids:

• We won’t sister a rotted wood post to a stake. It buys one season and fails in the next wind event. The post gets replaced with driven steel, or we don’t touch it.
• We won’t re-stretch failed chain link over bent posts. Straighten or replace the structure first; mesh follows.
• We won’t rebuild on posts we know are on the way out. If three posts failed this spring and five more wiggle, we’ll show you — hanging new sections on dying posts is throwing your money into next year’s repair.
• We won’t guess on vinyl panel matches. Vinyl profiles vary by manufacturer; a near-miss looks worse than the damage did. We confirm the profile first, and if it’s discontinued we’ll tell you the honest options.

Whatever we fix carries the same driven-steel standard as our new builds — that’s the whole reason a Get Fenced! repair holds. If you’d rather get a ballpark before anyone visits, the instant estimate covers full runs and replacements; for true repairs, call or text and send a photo — most of the time I can tell you the fix and the range from the picture. – Dave Rogers, licensed and insured