When it comes to garden fencing or other fencing needs, natural wood has long been the favored material for residential landscape fencing. Its natural appeal has made wood the first choice for most homeowners for many years. Easy to cut and assemble, widely available, and relatively affordable, wood fencing can be adapted to just about any landscape style and is a relatively easy material for DIYers to work with.
For over 40 years, PVC (polyvinyl chloride) plastic has become more prevalent in landscaping. Vinyl is a petroleum-based product with various uses in the building trades, and one of its recent adaptations is for landscape-fencing materials.
Unlike wood fencing, vinyl fencing doesn’t rot, doesn’t warp, and never needs painting. But it has a few downsides: it’s difficult to repair, prominently shows dirt and grime, and has limited design choices.
Products
A point-by-point comparison between vinyl and traditional wood will help you decide if vinyl is the right option for your fence.
Vinyl Fence
Made from the same plastic used in white plastic plumbing pipes, vinyl is widely used in fencing materials. Some home centers now stock vinyl fencing components and preassembled panels in a limited range of colors.
The first vinyl fences were simple white plastic panels with shiny surfaces—not very natural looking—but now additional colors, including brown wood tones, are available. Some vinyl fencing is now even textured to resemble wood. These days, nearly any fencing style can be constructed in vinyl. The material ranges from ranch-style rails to New England pickets or tall solid-panel privacy fences.
Wood Fence
With wood fences, the materials are simple and easy to define: wood. Different types of woods are used, often cedar, soft pine, redwood, and cypress.
Most wood used for fences can be left unstained and untreated. Western red cedar, for example, starts red but quickly weathers to an attractive silver-gray.
Wood can be painted, but it’s usually best to coat it with a fence preservative. Ranging from solid color to semi-transparent to transparent, fence coatings let the beauty of the natural wood show through.
Cost
Do-it-yourself vinyl fence panels were considerably more costly than wood panels when they became popular in the 1980s; this price difference has narrowed significantly. Preassembled fencing panels at major big-box home improvement centers are moderately priced compared to wood.
Appearance
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and nowhere is this more accurate than with landscape fences. Many people will find real wood’s warm colors more attractive than vinyl plastic fencing.
Wood is a versatile material that can be left to weather naturally or stained or painted however you want. A wood fence can be custom-built to make it unique to your landscape and readily adapted to uneven building sites.
Comparatively, vinyl tends to look best when it tries to mimic the look of a traditional white-painted fence, but even in that case, it still looks artificial. Older vinyl fences and less expensive new products have a shiny, somewhat artificial surface.
As vinyl fences weather, the shininess may give way to a chalky coating that dulls the look of the fence. Vinyl fence panels stocked in bulk come in limited options, so you may be disappointed that your fence looks precisely like dozens of others in your community. When building with mass-produced vinyl panels, it is hard to get a designer look.
Maintenance of Vinyl vs. Wood Fencing
Vinyl doesn’t decay, and it doesn’t need to be sealed, stained, or painted. Vinyl fencing is largely maintenance-free, which is why so many ranches, farms, and commercial operations opt for vinyl fencing for large installations. Easy maintenance greatly outweighs appearance and other considerations when you have a lot of fencing to maintain. Properly sealed wood will resist rotting for a few seasons but must always be re-sealed. Some fence woods, such as cedar, are naturally oily and better at fighting decay than others. Still, all woods benefit from some surface treatment, whether you are sealing or painting. If your only priority is eliminating fence rot, vinyl fences are the way to go.
