Somewhere between the slab pour and the final inspection, most custom home clients discover that the fence is their problem. It is not in the contract, it is not in the builder’s program, and nobody has mentioned it since the display home visit eighteen months earlier.
This is normal. Fencing, retaining, landscaping and often a portion of the driveway sit outside a standard residential building contract, which means they fall to the owner to organise, schedule and pay for. The trouble is not the cost. It is the timing. By the time most clients get to the boundary, decisions have already been made elsewhere on site that quietly removed the better options.
What follows is the sequence that avoids that, drawn from the mistakes that recur most often on Australian custom builds.
What Your Building Contract Excludes
Start by reading the exclusions schedule properly. Across most residential building contracts you can expect to find boundary fencing, retaining walls, landscaping, clothes lines, letterboxes, and driveway or crossover works beyond a nominated point excluded or capped at an allowance.
Two of those matter more than the rest.
Retaining. If your block needs retaining to create the building platform, establish very early who is responsible for which walls and at what point in the program they happen. A retaining wall that has to go in after the house is built, on a site with no machine access, can cost several times what the same wall costs before the slab.
Crossover and driveway extent. Contracts frequently cover the driveway to a nominated point rather than to the garage, and the crossover itself is often a separate local government process. Knowing where the builder stops tells you what you are organising.
Ask for the exclusions in writing with the boundary items itemised, not summarised. “Landscaping excluded” covers an enormous amount of ground.
Dividing Fences and Sharing Costs With Neighbours
In Western Australia, dividing fences are governed by the Dividing Fences Act 1961, which provides a framework for neighbours to share the cost of a sufficient dividing fence. Most states have equivalent legislation. The mechanism generally involves giving written notice of the proposed fence and the proposed cost, with a process for resolving disagreement.
Two realities worth planning around.
Cost sharing has limits. The framework contemplates sharing the cost of a sufficient fence, meaning a reasonable, standard boundary fence. If you want something above that standard, whether that is extra height, a premium material or a particular colour, the difference is ordinarily yours. Approaching a neighbour with a quote for a 2.1-metre feature boundary and an expectation of a 50-50 split tends to go badly.
Timing is leverage. A neighbour approached during your build, when the old fence has already been removed for site access and the boundary is open, is in a very different frame of mind from one approached cold. Have the conversation while the practical need is visible.
Retaining walls on boundaries are a separate matter and generally sit outside the dividing fences framework, with responsibility usually following whoever caused the change in level. If your build involves cut or fill at a boundary, raise it as its own conversation rather than bundling it with the fence. These provisions vary between states and turn on specific facts, so treat this as general information and get proper advice if there is any disagreement.
The Right Order for Retaining, Fencing and Landscaping
The single most expensive boundary mistake on a custom build is doing things in the wrong order. The workable sequence:
1- Retaining first. Always. Machine access, spoil removal and footing excavation all need room. A retaining wall built after the fence means removing the fence.
2- Service conduits and sleeves next, before any paving or driveway goes down. More on this below, because it is the item most often missed.
3- Boundary fencing before landscaping. Fencing involves post holes, concrete, cutting and spoil. Doing it after the garden is established means damage to the garden or an expensive hand-barrow operation.
4- Driveway and crossover, once anything that needs to pass beneath them is in.
5- Gates and automation last, but wired for during step two.
6- Landscaping and irrigation, working to the finished boundary levels.
Where this gets compressed in practice is the window between practical completion and move-in. It is tempting to leave the boundary until after handover, and sometimes there is no choice. But if there is any way to get retaining and fencing done while the site is still a site, with machine access, no established garden and no fences in the way, it is materially cheaper.
Run Conduit Before the Driveway Is Poured
This is the recommendation that saves the most money for the least effort, and almost nobody does it unprompted.
Before the driveway is poured, run spare conduit beneath it from the house or meter position to the gate location. At minimum: one 50mm conduit for power and one 32mm for data or intercom cabling, with draw wires in both, capped and surveyed so you can find them later.
You may not be installing an automatic gate now. You might in five years. Retrofitting power and comms to a gate across a finished exposed-aggregate driveway means either cutting and patching it, which never matches, or running a visible surface conduit around the perimeter. Two lengths of conduit and twenty minutes of a labourer’s time during the build eliminates a four-figure problem later.
While you are at it, sleeve under any paved area that irrigation, lighting or future garden power will need to cross. The same logic applies and the same regret follows.
How Wide Should Your Gates Be?
Gate openings get sized from the drawing rather than from use, and the result is a gate that fits a car and nothing else.
Think about what will actually need to pass through over the life of the house. A caravan or boat on a trailer needs considerably more than a car, and more than the trailer’s width, because a towed vehicle needs swing room to turn in. Bins need a pedestrian gate wide enough to roll through without scraping knuckles. Trades need to get a bobcat or a mini excavator into the backyard at some point, for a pool, a shed, a deck or a dead tree, and a 900mm pedestrian gate means that machine is coming through the house side or not at all.
Practical minimums worth considering: 1.2 metres for a pedestrian gate you will wheel things through, and a side access gate wide enough for small plant if the backyard has no other entry. If a boat or caravan is in your future, size the driveway gate for it now, widening a gate later means new posts, and new posts in a finished driveway means breaking concrete.
Choosing Colorbond Fencing for a Custom Build
On a custom home, the boundary is part of the architecture whether you treat it that way or not. It is usually the largest single surface visible from the main living space, and on a narrow infill block it can be three metres from the window.
Colorbond steel remains the default for Australian boundary fencing, and in a custom build context it earns that position for reasons beyond cost. The colour range is matched to the roofing and guttering range, which means the boundary can be specified to coordinate with, or deliberately contrast against, the roof you have already chosen. It arrives finished, needs no painting, resists termites and fire in a way timber does not, and it installs quickly, which matters when you are compressing boundary work into a short window.
The decisions within it that affect the result:
Matching Fence Colour to the Roof
The most common mistake is choosing the boundary colour from a sample card without the roof colour beside it. Darker boundaries recede and make planting read strongly; lighter ones bounce light into a narrow side yard. Matching the fence exactly to the roof can look flat, choosing a tone from the same family, a step darker or lighter, usually reads better.
Fence Height and Slat Toppers
Standard residential height is 1.8 metres. Where more privacy is needed, slat or lattice toppers extend the height while keeping the mass down, and often sit better than simply ordering a taller sheet. Note that extra height may take you beyond what the dividing fences framework treats as sufficient, which affects cost sharing, and may have planning implications in a front setback.
Plinths and Sloping Ground
Where ground falls along a boundary, the fence either steps or runs over a plinth. Decide which before the landscaping sets the levels, because a fence stepping down a slope with a 200mm gap under one bay is a drainage and dog-containment problem as well as an aesthetic one.
Matching Gates to the Fence
A gate in the same colour and profile as the boundary, with its framing designed to continue the line, reads as part of the fence. A gate ordered separately reads as a hole.
Because so much of this depends on coordinating colour, levels and gate hardware across the whole site, it is worth engaging the fencing contractor during the build rather than after. Perth builds illustrate the point well. Specialists such as FencrGatr handle Colorbond fencing Perth projects alongside the retaining and gate work, which is what allows plinth heights, fence levels and gate automation conduits to be resolved against the actual finished site levels rather than retrofitted to them. The coordination is the value, more than the fence itself.
Budgeting for Boundary and Fencing Work
Boundary costs vary with length, height, access, ground conditions and how much retaining is involved, so any figure quoted generically will be wrong for your block. What is more useful is knowing which variables move the number:
– Total boundary length, which on a battle-axe or irregular lot is often much more than clients estimate. Measure it off the survey.
– Retaining extent and height, the largest single swing factor.
– Ground conditions. Sand, rock and reactive clay each demand different footings. Limestone or rock requires coring, which is slow.
– Access. Anything a machine cannot reach costs significantly more in labour.
– Height and material upgrade above the standard dividing fence.
– Gates and automation, where a motorised driveway gate is a different order of cost from a manual one.
Get boundary quotes at the same time as you are pricing the build, not at handover. It avoids both the budget surprise and the temptation to compromise the boundary because the contingency has gone.
Custom Home Fencing Checklist
Before you sign: get boundary, retaining and driveway exclusions itemised in writing.
Before the slab: settle who is responsible for which retaining walls and when they go in.
Before any paving: run spare conduit under the driveway to the gate position, plus sleeves for irrigation and lighting crossings. Survey their locations.
Before ordering the fence: choose the colour with the roof sample in hand, confirm height against the dividing fences position, and size every gate for the widest thing that will ever need to pass through it.
Before landscaping: get the boundary and its levels finished, so the garden is built to the fence rather than around it.
And talk to the neighbours while the boundary is still open and the need is obvious. It is the cheapest step on the list.
