Fence company Livonia owners use for ranch yards, pools and shared back lines

A mile-road grid of ranch houses and rectangular lots

The city is laid out on the familiar Metro Detroit grid, with Five, Six, Seven and Eight Mile roads crossing Middlebelt, Merriman, Farmington and Newburgh. Inside each square, subdivisions were platted with lots of fairly even width and depth, and the houses are mostly single-story ranches, with some bi-levels and colonials mixed in from later decades.

That regularity helps. Rear yards in a Livonia subdivision are often wide enough for a contractor to bring an auger in on a small machine, and the lines tend to be straight. The challenge is length: a full perimeter on a typical lot can mean a long rear run, two side runs and one or two gates, and every one of those feet is shared with somebody.

Old chain link and the first wave of replacements

Walk almost any Livonia block and you will see galvanized chain link that has been standing since the house was new, often with a top rail gone dull and a few line posts leaning toward the yard that gets the most snow. Plenty of owners now want privacy instead, and the most common job here is pulling that old fence and putting up wood or vinyl in its place.

Removal is real work in this suburb. Original posts were frequently set in concrete, and those footings stay put even after the steel rusts. A contractor will want to know whether the new posts can sit in the same spots or whether the line has to shift slightly to clear the old plugs. The chain link fence page explains what a sound chain link framework looks like if you would rather keep and refresh it.

Back-to-back yards and the neighbors who share your line

Because Livonia lots meet at the rear, one back fence can border two or three households at once. That makes the conversation with neighbors matter more than the choice of picket. Some owners split the work along a shared section, some agree on a single style so the rear of the block looks consistent, and some simply build fully on their own side and leave the old fence to the neighbor.

Which face points outward is a common sticking point. A good-neighbor style that looks finished from both sides avoids the argument, and the wood fence page covers styles like shadowbox and board-on-board that suit a shared line.

Rear easements, utility lines and drainage swales

Many Livonia subdivisions were platted with a utility easement along the rear lot line, and overhead lines, poles and pedestals often sit there. A fence can usually go in an easement, but the utility keeps the right to reach its equipment, which may mean a gate, a removable section or a gap. The plat or a survey shows where the easement runs.

The same strip often carries a shallow swale that moves storm water between yards. Clay here drains slowly, and a solid fence that sits tight to the ground across a swale acts like a small dam. Leaving clearance under the bottom rail, or stepping the panels so water can pass, keeps the next heavy rain from backing up into someone's yard. A MISS DIG 811 locate comes before any of that digging.

Pool yards and the barrier rules that come with them

Livonia has a lot of in-ground pools, many of them added to back yards years after the houses were built. A pool barrier is a separate category of fence. The adopted code for the address covers things like self-closing and self-latching gates, latch position, picket spacing and avoiding anything a child could use as a foothold, and it sets the figures. A pool fence that misses one of those points may not pass inspection.

Ornamental steel and aluminum are common around pools because they keep the water visible from the house; the ornamental steel fence page discusses those pool barrier considerations. Solid vinyl also appears on pool yards where the owner wants privacy from neighboring windows.

Fence problems that keep coming up in Livonia

The issues a contractor sees in Livonia yards follow from the age of the fences and the flat, wet ground:

• Original chain link with rusted ties, loose fabric and line posts leaning where snow drifts against them each winter.
• Wood privacy fences from an earlier replacement, now gray and splitting, with the bottom boards soft where they touch soil.
• Posts pushed up by frost along the low rear line, where the swale keeps the clay saturated.
• Pool gates that no longer close on their own because a hinge post has shifted.
• Vinyl panels cracked by a snowblower, a ball or a hard freeze that caught a thin-walled product.

Permits, zoning and subdivision rules

Livonia may want a permit and an inspection before a fence goes up, so check with its building department for your address before anything is ordered. The city zoning code decides height, placement and how corner lots are handled near the street. A handful of subdivisions also carry deed restrictions or an association with style rules, and those apply on top of the city.

For anything beyond a simple swap of an existing fence, the fence installation page walks through the full sequence from marking the line to the final walk-through. If the existing fence only needs work on a few posts or a gate, the fence repair page is the better starting point.

Reading reviews and choosing who to trust in Livonia

Livonia homeowners tend to ask neighbors first and read online reviews second, which is a sensible order. When you do read reviews, look for photos of finished posts and gates rather than star totals, and pay attention to how a contractor handled a problem such as a gate that sagged or a line dispute. A clear written proposal that spells out removal, post setting and gate hardware says more than any rating.

Owners comparing notes with relatives in older city neighborhoods can see how those lots differ on the Dearborn page.

Common questions here

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