It’s exciting making changes to your home and land and seeing your property upgraded with a beautiful new fence. We love what we do and love making you, our clients, happy and satisfied! It’s why we do what we do! ?
Designing the fence, picking out the fencing material, and choosing where it’s going to be placed on your property is fun, for all of us! Everyone loves this part! ?
What’s not so fun is when we start the process, put the equipment in the ground to make your fence a reality and boom! WATER EVERYWHERE—or worse, yet—sewage! This is a big OOPS! ?
Help Us Help You
When you hire Florida Fence to design and install your fencing, we go through exhaustive steps to ensure that an “oops” doesn’t happen…
Here’s how:
Locating Underground Utilities: The Florida Fence Process
- After we first meet with you, we will go through a “pre-locate” process. This includes contacting Sunshine811 who will come out to mark where existing utility lines are located. You may know this as “call before you dig.”
- We will discuss anything YOU have done to the property to find underground wires or pipes that Sunshine 811 might not know about. A perfect example of this might be if you had a pool installed or if you had electricity run out to that backyard gazebo… or even if you had electric fencing installed to keep your pups safe.
- We will review your survey with you to look for possible easements that might be affected by the installation of a fence. Keep in mind, though, that surveys get outdated pretty quickly (that’s why there’s always a new one when a property changes hands!), so there may be easements that do not show up on your survey. Depending upon your situation, you may find that it’s a good idea to get a new survey of your property if you suspect there may be developments that you or we should know about.
- We won’t order any materials or obtain permits until the pre-locate has been completed, so just in case there is an issue, we can work with you to relocate the fence line and avoid problems.
- Shortly before the work begins, we will complete a final locate process and mark the utilities at that time. We wouldn’t want rain to wash away the marks, or wind to blow away any flags!
However, even though we go through all of this with you and we are glad to do it as part of our superior customer service, ultimately we can’t be and are not responsible for hitting something we don’t know is there. ? ⚠
You see, Sunshine 811 only covers and marks utilities to the meter of your home. This won’t include plumbing, sprinklers, pool equipment, and other private stuff that might be buried on your property.
It’s imperative that these other areas like plumbing, sprinklers, and pool equipment are brought to our attention by YOU. As the homeowner, it is your responsibility to flag lines for us prior to installation so we dig as carefully as possible around the flagged areas.
We know this can be tricky because some or all of this “other stuff” might have been installed by your builder or may have been added on later in the history of the home—and this information may or may not have been communicated to you or may have been lost.
We understand, but we need you to do your very best to help us “locate” these items or there may be an unfortunate “oops” that could cost you a lot of money.
PRO TIP: You can use spray paint to mark areas and use utility flags you can get at your local hardware store. You’ll need to do this close to your install date (ideally, the day before) so nothing disappears!
Other Possible “Gotchas”
A couple of other points – we would recommend that you tell your neighbors that fencing is being installed, since they may see some “nefarious” folks plotting out property lines or placing flags in the ground and we wouldn’t want them to worry (or shoot!).
And, of course, don’t forget to get any homeowners’ association approvals once we have provided you with the estimate.
By doing all of this, you help us help you and we can all end up happy at the end of the day… and you with a beautiful fence! ?
Photo via BigStock