The Garden Needs a Wall Before It Needs a Gate

Before a homeowner decides where the gate goes, they need to know where the property actually ends, and that line is often less certain than the old fence suggests.

Plenty of boundary walls and fences were put up by eye, by a previous owner, a builder or a neighbour, long before anyone checked the surveyed boundary. The legal line is fixed by the surveyor's diagram used when the property was registered, and it is marked on the ground by pegs that may have been buried, moved or lost over the years. Say an owner builds a new wall along the line of the old fence, only to discover later that the fence sat a little inside the neighbour's land. Now there is a wall on someone else's property, an unhappy neighbour and a problem that will come back when either house is sold.

A land surveyor can find or replace the pegs before any building starts, and that cost is small next to the cost of breaking down a wall. Once the boundary is certain, the other decisions get easier. Where the gate goes, how the driveway runs, whether a servitude is needed across the neighbour's land: all of them depend on knowing the line first.

It seems backwards to spend money on a boundary nobody can see. The gate is the part people notice, but it only works if the wall is standing in the right place.