Paragon Fence vs. Wood
When choosing to purchase, build, or have a fence installed there can be a lot of things to consider like how high your local bylaws dictate that it can be, whether there are any style or material restrictions for your subdivision or even utility locations, structure locations, or landscape features that will often dictate where you place your posts as well as any gates you wish to install.
One area people do not often go into detail is when getting a price on a particular product. Many times when getting a price on a fence product customers will ask how much per foot and while we can provide an estimate per foot cost on our products based on past projects and general install conditions this does not always reflect the final price.
Further when getting prices from some retailers, they sometimes will not add in the cost of posts, or fasteners, or paint or stain in an effort to make their per foot cost lower and more attractive to the potential buyer.
We have had several situations where a person received a quote on our product and then ultimately went with wood because according to their initial inquiries they thought they would be saving money, however, when the project was complete and he received his final bill from his contractor, the cost was more than the cost we had quoted.
Our Paragon fence products are an all metal, entirely maintenance free fencing solution. We provide free estimates for our products and our prices are all inclusive. Meaning if you want to purchase the product and install it yourself with the help of our install instructions, we price in absolutely every bit of product you need to complete the job. Let’s say you can get a good deal on steel tubing for posts and want to supply your own so you only need the rest of the items. No Problem we do that too. And what if you don’t want to get your hands dirty and would rather have the job professionally installed? Yup we do that! We have someone come to your location and sit down with you, figure out what it is you want, get all the details in order to avoid any surprises.
So how does our product compare to a wood fence? Every so often we phone around and collect pricing for different components that would be used in a pressure treated wood fence and we put together a bill of materials for 3 different styles of wood fence we label budget, midrange and well built and we price how much 100 lineal feet of each of those fences compare to Paragon fence products both in initial upfront costs as well as on going maintenance.
Above are the four different build options for Paragon maintenance free fence as well as the three different levels of Pressure Treated Wood fence. They all have their posts on approximately 8′ centers and this is material costs only. Installation was not included as each different fence style requires a slightly different installation procedure. The more complex the design, the longer it takes to install.
We can see from the above compiled chart that a Paragon fence is about the same cost as a well built pressure treated fence initially, however, the wood fences all require maintenance by way of additional paint or stain. You can take a look at the first image which shows the materials costs for the wood products, fasteners & stain or paint from Rona as at February 2019.
We have budgeted additional re-coatings at $670, this is approximately 5 pails of stain at $54/ea for a cost of $270 and around 20 hours of labour to paint the 100 ft of fence on both sides at $20/hour for a cost of $400 to get our $670 value. You need to recoat the wood fence every 4 – 5 years.
From the above information and chart you can see that at about the 10 year mark or after the second re-coating, the Pressure Treated Wood fences have surpassed the Paragon Fence in cost.