Fence Post Replacement

Fixing the actual cause of a leaning fence, without replacing panels that are still sound

When a fence starts leaning, it's very often the posts that have failed — rotted at ground level or come loose in their concrete footing — while the panels themselves are still perfectly sound, which means replacing just the posts, not the whole fence, is often the right and more cost-effective fix.

Timber fence posts fail at a fairly predictable point: right at, or just below, ground level, where the post sits in permanent contact with damp soil and, over years, the timber gradually rots from that contact even where the rest of the post above ground remains solid. Once a post has weakened at that point, it loses the structural strength to resist wind loading on the panels, and the whole fence starts leaning even though the panels themselves haven't degraded at all. Diagnosing this properly means checking each post individually along a leaning run, since it's common for some posts to have failed while neighbouring posts remain sound — replacing every post on a run when only some have actually failed is unnecessary cost, while missing a failed post and only replacing the obvious ones leaves the fence likely to lean again within a season or two. Where a post is replaced, options include a new timber post set in fresh concrete, or a metal post spur — a galvanised steel bracket bolted to the sound remaining timber above ground and set into a new concrete footing below, which avoids removing an otherwise undamaged panel entirely and can be a more efficient repair where only the very base of the post has rotted. Either way, the goal is a targeted, honest repair that fixes the actual point of failure rather than an unnecessarily wholesale replacement.