My neighbor's fence project taught me a hard lesson about concrete footings

My guy next door in Denver started building a privacy fence last month. He dug his posts 2 feet deep and just dropped them in with gravel no concrete. Well last week's windstorm blew three of his panels clean over. I had planned to copy his cheap method for my own fence but now I'm rethinking everything. The concrete quotes I got run about $200 extra for my whole yard. Has anyone else seen a fence fail because of skipping the cement?

2 comments

2 Comments

jamiew838d ago

Learned that lesson myself last summer. Built a shed and skimped on concrete for the corner posts. First big rainstorm shifted the whole thing six inches over. Had to tear it all down and start over. That $200 you're worried about now is nothing compared to the labor and materials you'll waste fixing a fallen fence. Concrete is cheap insurance for something you want to last more than a season. Freeze-thaw cycles here in Colorado will push those gravel footings right out of the ground eventually anyway.

the_joseph8d ago

Respectfully, I see this a little different. Gravel can work just fine if you do it right - the key is digging deep enough and tamping it down properly. A lot of folks just pour loose gravel in a hole and call it done, then wonder why things shift. If you're using something like crushed stone and packing it hard with a tamper every few inches, that stuff locks together and drains water way better than concrete does. Concrete can crack and trap moisture against the posts, which makes them rot out from the bottom over time. I've seen plenty of fences in wet climates that lasted 15+ years on well-packed gravel footings. The real enemy is lazy installation, not the material.