First Place Fence

It definitely bothers me a little bit that they just installed my fencing this week and one piece already looked old/rotten upon installation. There’s just one single piece that doesn’t match the rest of the fence, and you really can’t miss it. You’d think that you’d want to just replace the ugly piece? They were at my house walking by this on 3 separate days, no way they didn’t see it. I did immediately. But anyway, it’s a fence, it blocks what I wanted it to. And they were the cheapest company I could find. 🤷‍♀️

We had a wood gate put up and noticed bowing in the wood. We had concerns about how the gate latched when installed but was assured by the workers that it was fine. The hardware started to separate from the area on the gate that bowed and progressively got worse. I have been in communication with Matt for months. I either get a response that we are on the repair list, no one ever shows up… or I get no response at all when I check in. I’m very disappointed in the lack of response and the quality of the work. The gate has been unusable. We just want someone to repair the gate to make this right.

We chose First Place Fence after extensive research due to their exceptional online reviews. This was the first large improvement that we were making to our newly purchased house so we didn’t want to risk poor quality and decided to bite the bullet on the higher price. Little did we know we would end up paying a premium price for a 1-star quality fence. Kari came out and we determined the layout and price for the fence. Kari was personable and professional which apparently was a very limited time promotional experience. She informed us of a 5-week wait time after accepting the quote. I accepted the quote on May 10th and received an automated email confirmation. After over 7 weeks of not hearing from the company or Kari, we decided to contact them and were told it would be another 2 weeks. The length of time is not the main concern, it was the lack of communication. If not for us reaching out to them we would have had no communication with them from the day I met Kari until the day Kari informed me they would be coming out to do our fence. In July, Kari notified us that they would be out the following Monday. Then Wednesday. Then Thursday. Then, ultimately, Friday. Originally, Kari was certain they would be out on Thursday but at 2pm, Kari had no idea the fencing guys hadn't been out to our house yet until I informed her and she let us know to expect them Friday. Friday at 10am they arrived and we were nosy so we occasionally checked on our cameras. We noticed that an hour into working they left our property and didn’t return until after 12:30. They finished up for the day by 3:30 so in total they worked on our fence for less than 4 hours. When I got home from work I saw that one of the gates was installed in the wrong spot. Kari assured me it would be fixed on Monday. On Monday I informed Kari that I would be home in case they had questions. Our main concern was the fact that by putting the gate in the wrong location they installed a post into our concrete foundation. I texted Kari expressing this concern and she completely ignored the message and instead informed me that she will send me the invoice. She later claimed that she thought one of the employees was going to discuss it with me…they didn’t. Once they were done we realized all of the top poles were bowed and this was immediately pointed out by our neighbors as looking odd. I sent a very well thought out text laying out our concerns and received a typo-ridden response back from Kari. The lack of professionalism at this point was shocking to me. I had expressed what I felt were some serious concerns and it seemed that Kari simply used talk to text with no proofreading to respond. She swore to me that the bowing in the fence is how it is supposed to be but everyone who sees the fence is shocked at how curved it is. Later that week I found a pile of concrete in my yard so I went back and watched the footage to find an employee picking up the excess concrete and dumping it in our yard (video). I reached out to Matt with my concerns about the quality of the fence and the concrete in my yard. Matt proceeded to give me nothing but excuses including that it’s hard to find good guys to build fences. Personally if the owner of the company even admits that his employees aren’t up to his standards I would say there’s a problem. I also expressed concerns to Matt about how loose the bottom of the fence was. He told me that some give is normal and that a properly installed fence doesn’t need a tension wire. He did decide to have his guys come back out and install a tension wire on one side of the fence. On the other side my 60 pound Australian Shepard simply pushed his nose on the bottom of the fence and walked to the other side. We live on a busy road and our dog is an easily excitable puppy so the safety of our dog was the reason we got this fence. Luckily this other dog was friendly and luckily he didn’t run far and luckily there were no cars around but we shouldn’t have had to get lucky because we paid First Place Fence to keep our dog safe and secure in our yard.

Fence - I was told that the wood they used was better than the wood at Home Depot. That was a lie. Many of the boards on my new fence are damaged with cracks and holes. They then told me I should have paid more for better wood! The nails they put into my fence went through too far and came out the other side. I had to hammer them back through so nobody would get injured on them. Some boards were missing nails altogether and simply held on by 1. They also put my gate locking device on the wrong side of the gate. I asked multiple times for them to come back out and fix it. I kept hearing I was on the list and next week. They still have not come over a month later. I will be contacting the BBB about this business. Communication - I was told the job would be done in about 5 weeks and that they would give me a heads up a week in advance so that I could get my property ready. I was called the day before because some other property had cancelled. I worked hard to get as much ready as I could that night and then found out they were only dropping some wood off and that they would start the next day. The next day came and nobody showed up and no phone call. I called and they said it would now be Monday. Monday came and no one showed up. Again I called and found out they were waiting on Dig Safe. That's fine, but they shouldn't have told me they were starting till after they got the Dig Safe approval. I even called Dig Safe to see what their issue was. They said they had a question but couldn't get in touch with the company. Another communication issue was with them and Home Depot. I was told I needed to pay at Home Depot because I was financing through them. I went there half a dozen times with Home Depot telling me they couldn't take my payment until First Place sent them a number and First Place kept arguing with the Home Depot. It was very frustrating to be in the middle of the issue going back and forth. Finally we found out it was First Place that was in the wrong. They never supplied the number Home Depot needed to use to make the transaction go through. Clean up: The workers damaged some of my yard with the hole digging machine. They also left garbage and nails along my fence line and used my garbage can to put their trash in. All trash should have been taken out with them.