Pre-Stained Board-on-Board Cedar Privacy Fence in Plano

Here’s the during and after of a privacy fence we built in Plano, Texas. It’s our top-of-the-line wood fence: Western Red Cedar, pre-stained, built board-on-board with overlapping pickets. The photos show the back side of the fence, so you can see what holds it up: heavy-duty steel posts, the rails and a kickboard along the bottom.

Why we’re showing you the back of the fence

Most fence photos show the pretty side. We like showing the back, because that’s where you can tell a good fence from a cheap one. On this Plano job you can see:

• Heavy-duty steel posts. They don’t rot at the ground line, and they hold their line in clay soil that swells after rain and shrinks in dry summers. Plano’s dark clay is hard on wood posts; it’s why so many older fences in town lean.
• Rails fastened to every post. The rails carry the weight of the pickets. Straight rails mean a straight fence top years from now.
• A kickboard at the bottom. It keeps the cedar pickets off the dirt, where moisture rots wood first. When it wears out, you replace one board, not the fence.

What we built

Board-on-board means a second layer of pickets overlaps the gaps of the first. Cedar shrinks a little as it dries, and on a side-by-side fence those gaps open up. Here they don’t, so the privacy fence stays private from every angle, including from a neighbor’s yard on the other side.

We used Western Red Cedar because it holds its shape in Texas heat and resists rot and insects naturally. The pickets went up pre-stained, so the fence had its warm color the day we finished, with an even coat on every board.

How it went in

The process photos show the build: materials staged on site, then the steel posts and rails up first, then the cedar pickets going on in two layers. On a board-on-board fence, the spacing of that first layer decides how even the overlap looks, so it gets laid out across the whole run before the second layer goes on.

Plano requires a permit for a new fence, with a site plan and fence elevations, and caps fence height at 8 feet. Our fence company in Plano page covers the city’s permit rules, front-yard limits and alley visibility triangles in detail.

The result

A solid, warm-toned cedar privacy fence with a structure built to stay straight. If you want the same look at your house, our wood fence installation page walks through cedar vs. pine and board-on-board vs. side-by-side, with our $30 to $80 per foot price range.