Spring maintenance for a wooden fence: what to check after winter

Start with the posts — they carry the whole fence

Push each post firmly sideways and watch the base rather than the top. Any movement at ground level, even a few millimetres, means the concrete footing or the soil around it has loosened, usually from frost lifting the post over winter and dropping it back slightly off true. This is the fault that causes everything else, from crooked panels to gates that no longer latch.

Check posts at the ends of runs and either side of a gate first, since these take the most sideways load and show trouble earliest. If a post rocks but the timber itself is sound, it can often be re-set by digging out the loose concrete, packing with fresh gravel and quick-set concrete, and letting it cure before you load it again.

A post that is soft or crumbling at the base, particularly where it meets the ground, is a different problem: rot has set in and packing concrete around it will not help. That post needs replacing, and it is worth doing before you invest time in anything further up the fence.

Check the boards and pales one by one

Work along the fence board by board rather than glancing at the whole run, since a fence can look straight from a distance while individual fixings have failed. Push each board or pale gently front to back and side to side; any that flex more than their neighbours have a loose or corroded nail or screw.

Snow load bends thin pales and can split them along the grain near the top, where the wood is thinnest. Look along the top edge of each board for hairline cracks, and check horizontal rails for sagging in the middle, which usually means a fixing at one end has pulled through.

Re-driving a loose nail rarely holds for long in weathered timber; replacing it with a slightly longer galvanised screw into sound wood gives a better result. Keep a small bag of matching screws and a cordless drill on hand so you can fix each board as you find it rather than making two passes.

• Push every board front-to-back and side-to-side, not just the ones that look loose
• Check the top edge of each pale for splits from snow load
• Look at horizontal rails for sagging in the middle
• Replace loose nails with galvanised screws into sound timber
• Mark or note any board that needs replacing rather than fixing

Look at the paint and the wood before deciding to re-stain

Not every fence needs painting every spring. Run a hand over the surface: if the old coat is chalky and comes off as a light dust but the wood beneath is firm and pale, a fresh coat of stain will do the job. If the paint has lifted in flakes or blistered, that patch needs scraping and sanding back to bare wood before anything new goes on, or the new coat will fail in the same place within a season.

Grey, silvered timber under a failed coating is usually just weathered wood and not a structural problem, though it is worth reading through separately if you are unsure whether it needs treating at all. What matters for spring is timing: stain and paint need dry wood and daytime temperatures reliably above about 10°C to cure properly, so late April through May is usually too early in a wet spring and the drier weeks of late May or June work better.

If you are short on the weekend it would take to prep and coat a full fence run, painting and decorating work is available from 12 € per job, which is worth considering for a fence that just needs a proper repaint rather than repair.

Clear the base of the fence and check the drainage

Winter leaves a build-up of leaves, snow-flattened grass and soil splashed up against the base of the fence, and all of it holds moisture against the timber long after the rest of the garden has dried out. Clear a gap of several centimetres between the ground and the bottom of the boards using a hoe or edging spade, and rake fallen debris away from both sides of the run.

Check where rainwater and melting snow actually go along the fence line. A gutter downpipe discharging near a post, or a dip in the ground that collects standing water against the footing, will rot timber and undermine concrete far faster than exposure to rain alone.

If water is pooling against a section of fence, a shallow drainage channel or a change in the grading of the soil nearby usually solves it. This is worth doing before you repaint, since a freshly coated fence sitting in wet ground will not stay looking good for long.

When to call a specialist and when to manage it yourself

Loose boards, a light re-stain, clearing debris and minor drainage fixes are all reasonable weekend jobs for someone comfortable with a drill and a spade. Re-setting a single wobbly post is manageable too, provided the post itself is sound and you are prepared to wait for concrete to cure before loading it.

Several posts moving together, a fence leaning as a whole rather than at one point, or rot found in more than one or two posts usually points to a foundation problem along the whole run rather than an isolated fix, and that is worth getting looked at properly rather than patched post by post.

Fence repair and installation work, from 45 € per hour, covers everything from replacing a single rotten post to resetting a run that has moved out of true, with a fixed quote given in advance for larger jobs so you know the figure before work starts.