Chain link fencing in Chatsworth, California

Where chain link earns its keep

Chain link is not the fence for your street frontage, and it does not pretend to be. What it does better than anything else is enclose ground cheaply and let you see through it. On a Chatsworth lot that means a few clear jobs: a side-yard dog run, a safe boundary between a play area and the open space, a utility or trash enclosure, and above all the long perimeter line on an acreage or horse property where a solid fence would cost several times as much. Because you can see through it, chain link keeps sight lines open, which owners of foothill lots with a view tend to value.

The material also takes add-ons well. Privacy slats woven through the mesh turn a see-through fence into a screened one. A ranch rail cap along the top dresses up a chain link line on a horse property so it reads as rail from the road while still holding the cost down. And a bottom tension wire or a buried rail closes the gap that a digging dog or a coyote would exploit.

Galvanized, coated, gauge, and height

Two choices set the price and the look. The first is the finish. Galvanized mesh is the raw silver you picture, the cheapest and the right pick for anything out of sight. Vinyl-coated mesh, usually black or green, costs a little more and visually recedes, so a coated back fence almost vanishes against the hills. The second is the gauge and height. A heavier gauge wire and a taller fence, five or six feet, cost more but stand up to weather and to animals better than a light residential mesh. We match both to the job rather than selling one spec for every lot.

• Galvanized, 4 ft. The value option for a side yard or dog run.
• Vinyl-coated, 5 to 6 ft. A back line that stays out of the view, taller for containment.
• With privacy slats. A screened line where you want some cover without a solid wall.
• With a rail cap. A dressed-up look on a horse or foothill property.

Setting chain link in Chatsworth ground

Most of a chain link fence is line posts and stretched mesh, which go up quickly. The parts that decide whether it stays tight are the terminal posts: the corners, the ends, and the gate posts that carry all the tension in the run. Those are the posts we set deepest, and on a Chatsworth lot they are also the ones most likely to hit sandstone. Where a corner or gate footing lands on rock, we drill it to full depth rather than shortcutting, because a tension post that heaves in the wind slackens the whole fence. It is the same rock story as any fence here, concentrated at the corners.

One more local note: Chatsworth backs directly onto open space, and the wildlife pressure is real. For coyote and predator control on a property near the hills, we go taller, keep the bottom tight to the ground with a tension wire, and close any dip under the line where the grade falls away.

Chain link pricing in Chatsworth

Ranges cover posts, mesh, hardware, and labor. Taller mesh, a vinyl coating, privacy slats, a rail cap, and rock drilling for the tension posts move you up. See the full breakdown on the Chatsworth fence cost guide.

Keep reading

The main guide to Chatsworth fence services pulls all of this into one page.