Fence Removal in Boise: Call 811 Before You Pull Posts

A guy off Ustick called us last spring after he'd already gotten started. He'd pulled four posts out of an old cedar fence with a chain and a bumper jack, felt pretty good about it, then caught a sprinkler lateral on the fifth. Water everywhere, a muddy crater in the lawn, and a repair bill bigger than the fence removal would have been.

Here's what nobody thinks about until it's too late. The fence sits above ground, so the whole job feels like it's above ground.

But every post you pull leaves a hole you didn't dig, in dirt you've never seen the inside of. And along a fence line, there's usually something down there.

What's buried along a fence line

Fence lines collect buried stuff. They mark the property edge, which is where utility easements tend to run, and they're the natural path when somebody wants power or water out to a shed.

In older parts of town, the North End, the Bench, chunks of Garden City, the fence line is where a previous owner ran a line to a workshop thirty years ago. No permit, no record, and maybe eight inches deep because that's how deep they felt like digging that afternoon.

Newer Meridian and Nampa subdivisions have the opposite problem. The easement sits along the rear property line by design, so gas, primary electric, cable, and fiber can all be running behind that back fence within a few feet of your posts.

Then there's the private stuff. Sprinkler mainline and laterals, drip tubing, low-voltage landscape lighting, the wire for an invisible dog fence. Almost every yard we work in has at least one of those crossing a fence line somewhere.

Call Digline before your fence removal starts

Idaho's one-call service is Digline. Dial 811 or file a ticket online, and it costs you nothing.

Give them two full business days before you dig, not counting weekends or holidays. Locators come out and paint or flag the public utilities they're responsible for.

People assume 811 is only for big excavation. It isn't. Pulling a post is digging, and the state dig law doesn't care whether you're running an excavator or a shovel and a lot of stubbornness.

The marks come in standard colors, so you can read your own yard once the locators leave:

Now the catch. Locators mark up to the meter, and anything past the meter counts as a private line, which makes it yours. Your sprinkler system, your landscape lighting, that mystery line somebody ran to the shed in 1994. None of it gets marked, and those are exactly the lines that get hit during a tear-out.

Finding the lines nobody's going to mark for you

Since the private lines are on you, give it twenty minutes before you touch a post.

Run your sprinklers one zone at a time and walk the fence with a can of marking paint. Any head within about three feet of the fence has a lateral feeding it, and that lateral came from somewhere. Mark the heads, then mark your best guess at the path back to the valve box.

A few other things worth a look:

• Power or water running to a shed, coop, pool equipment, or detached garage near the fence
• Landscape lighting transformers, which mean a low-voltage run is close by
• A collar-and-wire dog fence, usually buried an inch or two deep right along the fence line

When we're not sure, we open the first foot around a questionable post by hand, or soften it with a hose and a probe. Slower? Yes. Cheaper than a gas strike? Every time.

What fence removal costs when the digging goes wrong

The locate window is the part that catches people. Planning to knock out the fence on Saturday and calling 811 Friday morning? You're not digging Saturday. Call it in Monday or Tuesday and you're fine.

Most fence removal around the Treasure Valley runs $3 to $8 per linear foot, depending on the material, how the posts are set, and whether somebody's hauling the debris. Concrete-set posts push toward the top of that range, and we get into why in our post on dealing with the concrete footings.

A struck sprinkler main runs $200 to $600 once you count the trenching and the repair. Hit gas or fiber and you're looking at a utility repair bill plus a possible fine under Idaho's dig law. Not a close call.

When you hire us for fence removal, the locate call is part of the job. We file the ticket, schedule around the two-day window, and hand-dig anything near a mark. Old fence wood heads to the Ada County landfill, and chain link, steel posts, and gate hardware go to Western Recycling instead of the trash.

Could you do all of this yourself? Sure, and plenty of people do. We lay out the honest tradeoffs in our DIY versus hiring it out breakdown. Just don't skip the 811 call because it's the boring step.

Bottom line

Call 811 two business days out, mark your own sprinklers and low-voltage lines, and treat every post hole like there's something in it. That's most of the trick.

If you'd rather hand off the digging and the debris, give us a call at (208) 593-2877 and we'll take a look at your fence line. We'll tell you straight if it's a job you can knock out on your own.