A fence in Southwest Florida lives a hard life. Sun, rain, wind, and the occasional hurricane all take their swings, and after enough years the thing's more gray than brown, leaning in spots and missing pickets where the last storm grabbed them. At some point patching it stops making sense and the whole run has to come out. Pulling a fence is straightforward, but it comes apart in stages, and each stage has its own kind of stubborn.
Pickets come off easy, mostly
The pickets are the boards you see, the vertical part. These are the friendly part of the job. They're nailed or screwed to the rails, and on an old fence half the fasteners have already rusted loose, so they practically fall off on their own. A pry bar pops them off, and you stack them as you go. The catch is the count. A long fence has a lot of pickets, and once they're all off and piled up, you've got more wood than you'd guess. Old fence boards are light but they take up room, so the pile grows fast. Watch the nails sticking out of the rails while you work, because a rusty nail through a glove is a bad way to end the afternoon.
Posts are the part that fights back
The posts are where the work hides. They're set deep, and a lot of them around here are sunk in concrete footings the size of a five-gallon bucket. Wood posts that have rotted at the ground line sometimes snap right off and leave the concrete behind. The stubborn ones need digging, a long pry bar, and a few words you wouldn't say in front of your mother. Each footing is a chunk of concrete to wrestle out and haul away, and concrete is heavy, so this is where the weight in the job really lives.
What a dumpster handles, and the haul
The pickets, rails, posts, and broken concrete footings all go the same place: gone. A roll-off dumpster in the driveway makes this easy because you can toss the wood as you pull it and drop the footings in as they come out. Just keep the concrete in mind on weight. Our rentals include 2,000 pounds, and a load of footings can climb past that, so if you're pulling a long fence with a lot of concrete, send a photo and we'll help you figure out the right size and what the weight might run.
If digging out concrete in July sounds like a bad afternoon, we get it. Our junk removal and cleanouts crew pulls fences, footings and all, and hauls the whole mess off so your fence guy can start clean. We cover our service area across Charlotte and Lee County, so wherever the old fence is leaning, we can get to it. And if you've got other storm debris piling up while you're at it, we can take that too.
Storm took a swing at your fence? Finish the job. Call or text 239-412-3283, tell us how long the run is and whether there's concrete in the ground, and we'll tell you what it'll take to clear it.