Fencing in Highfields

New estate boundaries, driveway gates and gate automation at Highfields

A new house at Highfields usually arrives before its fences do, so the useful first step is working out which lines are yours alone and which are shared. A fence built wholly inside your own boundary is your own work at your own cost and needs nobody's agreement. A fence sitting on the boundary itself is a dividing fence, and Queensland runs that on the registered owner of the adjoining lot, which on a newly released street may be a builder, an investor or a family who moved in a fortnight ago. When three neighbours all reach that point in the same season there is a genuine advantage in talking early, because two adjoining owners agreeing on one material and one contractor for a shared run costs each of them less than two separate mobilisations along the same line. One thing to settle before you order anything: in Queensland a contractor needs a QBCC licence for residential fencing work valued at $3,300 or more including labour and materials.

Then the site itself, because Highfields sits high on the range and a good number of the newer estates are on open, elevated ground with nothing built upwind of them yet. The Australian wind-classification standard combines region, terrain, shielding and topography, so a block on a rise with clear ground around it is a more demanding site than the same block once the street is full of houses. A solid run, whether steel panels or overlapped timber, presents an unbroken face to that load. That is not a reason to avoid one, but it does mean post size, post spacing and footing depth follow the manufacturer's wind tables for your actual block rather than a standard depth. Nobody can hand you a wind class for the suburb off the top of their head, and the estates closest to the escarpment edge are exactly where guessing shows up first, usually as a rattle and then as a lean.

On a new build the material choice is genuinely open, because there is no existing fence on any side to tie into. Steel panel systems go up quickly, hold a straight line, need no repainting cycle and come in colours that can be matched to the roof or the garage door, which is why they dominate the newer streets off Highfields Road and Wirraglen Road. Overlapped timber palings with a capping board give a warmer look, suit a rendered or weatherboard facade and cost less to buy, but they want sealing or oiling periodically and every board is a piece that can cup or twist. Neither is maintenance-free in an exposed position, and they fail differently: steel takes the wind load as a single sheet, timber takes it board by board. The practical question is usually how long you plan to be there and whether you want to be painting a fence in five years.

The driveway is the part people underestimate. Entrances off the New England Highway service roads and along O'Brien Road often sit a long way back from the house, and getting out of the car twice in the rain to swing a gate open gets old quickly, so automation here is practical rather than indulgent. Three things settle the specification: the span, the gate type and the power. A sliding gate suits a wide opening where there is room to run alongside it; swing leaves need a clear arc and reasonably level ground, which is not a given on a sloping entrance. The motor is sized to the actual leaf weight rather than to a size category. And where there is no mains power out at the gate, a solar panel and battery arrangement is the normal answer, but it belongs in the specification from the start, because retrofitting power to a hung gate costs more and works less tidily.