First Fence Inc

I received a quick response to my inquiry to set up an appointment for an estimate. Kevin M. was able to come out and do the estimate quickly and provided two options. His price was in line with other quotes. We were quoted 2-3 time frame before installation. Due to a cancellation, the installation was within about two weeks. The fence was installed in one day and the workers did a good job of cleaning the worksite. Would definitely recommend.

The process seemed to take longer than it should have but I am very pleased with the final product.

Did not hire due to the provider not responding to requests.

This was a difficult experience. All seemed well at the beginning- First Fence responded to calls, came out quickly, gave multiple options and written estimate. After I paid A 50% down payment, things went bad. No one called to schedule the installation. I called to follow up and the scheduler was very rude and tried to throw the sales guy under the bus saying it was his fault. I signed the contact on June 10, 2015, and installation did not take place until July 29, 2015 - some 6 weeks later. They claimed that obtaining the material took longer than anticipated. During installation they did not call before they arrived. (1/2 hour late) I called over 1/2 hour after scheduled to start, to check in as to where they were and scheduler said they were there. Installation took about 1 hour longer than anticipated. The lock on the aluminum gate was not as agreed to and the direction of fence entry on the chain link was odd. When called to follow up with sales person about these two issues, they were rude and dismissive. Currently, we are the process of trying to correct theses issues, but I do not have high hopes. I think we were treated poorly because we were a "small project" the sales person spoke about how many big projects they handled. I will not recommend First Fence.

Quote was in line with others. Work was performed when promised. Quality of workmanship was A+. No complaints.

The sales person came and described very professionally and politely the process for repair. I explained that I needed the work done quickly so as to put the house up for sale. They worked with me to quickly make the repairs juggling the weather and their customers. The crew was expert, the workmanship fantastic and all done with plenty of time to spare. I would highly recommend them!

First Fence did an amazing job! They were quick to respond to my request for an estimate and presented a thorough diagram of what they would do. The salesperson also presented me with a few other options for posts, beam width, etc. They were not pushy and answered all of my questions. The installers came two days in a row and worked the entire time, finishing prior to the end of day two. They were courteous and professional. I thought the price was somewhat fair and the only issue I had afterwards was that they did not put handles on both sides of the gates. When I called the salesperson and expressed my concern, he sent the guys over to add handles within a few days.

From start to finish I have had a great experience with First Fence. I got three quotes from three different companies, including one of their major competitors on Angie's List. They were the only one who took the time with me to really measure my property line and allow me to save some trees I did not want to have to cut down. The salesperson, Dan Buenz, spent a long time with me on design and addressing special needs in my backyard. Everyone has been prompt, professional, friendly, and very receptive to my questions. The workmen cleaned up after themselves and did not leave a scrap of dirt. I watched as they meticulously removed the dirt from my lawn. They did an incredible job with the fence. I gave them a "B" in price because they were slightly higher than the other two quotes but I went with them because I felt like they really cared about meeting my needs and doing the job just the way I wanted it. I would not hesitate to use First Fence again!

Dan was the sales rep that came out to my house to give me an estimate on a 50' run of western red cedar fence and 2 chain link gates. If everyone in the company from the owner (John) down to his 2 man crew headed by Pancho was as professional as Dan I would be writing a positive review right now instead of a negative one. The estimate process went very smoothly, in fact Dan was probably the most professional and comprehensive in educating me on materials and the installation process. He was more concerned about educating me than selling me and it was in the process of educating me that he actually sold me. I was able to schedule installation within 2 weeks (which I thought was pretty quick). A two man crew showed up (very nice and polite). I let them get to work while I remained in the house (I don't like to watch over people as they work). I went out to take a look as they were finishing up. Nothing seemed right at first look and it only got worse the closer I inspected their work. I had ordered 2 gates to be installed, when I went outside they had both sets of the posts for the gates already in the ground. I could tell from a couple feet away that both sets of posts were misaligned. Each of the two sets of posts were a couple inches off from the opposite post. I didn't need to take a laser level to it to figure this out, it was very plain to see. I could have done much better setting these posts by just eyeballing it and here are 2 "professionals" that I am paying and they did no be lining these posts up to one another than a couple of drunk monkeys. I then walked over to the wooden fence. It was straight with similar spacing between the fence and the ground through the whole run, but something did not look right about the wood boards. I paid for 3/4" grade "1a" cedar and I knew right away from my experience that this was not grade 1 cedar, and I was highly doubting that it was even western red cedar. The wood was very pale, almost white (reminded me of pine) with no reddish hue whatsoever, and every 6' board had between 6 and 10 large diameter (2-3 inch) knots. Then I walked around to the finished side and it looked even worse. Instead of long 8' sections running horizontally at the top and bottom there were much shorter pieces that looked like scraps (I think these pieces actually were pine) pieced together to give a VERY UNPROFESSIONAL looking fence. It would have looked sub par on the Clampett's property before they moved to Beverly. On top of that, the pieced together top and bottom border overlapped the posts so it would be impossible to remove an 8' section like the owner (John) said I would be able to. When I pointed that out to the workers they looked at each other like their finger went through the toilet paper. They new they messed up. I called John, the owner of First Fence, to see how he wanted to handle it. I calmly explained the many issues I had with the fence and the installation and he told me he would call me back in a couple days and try and setup a time to come out to take a look at it the following week. I agreed to that at the time but within a minute of hanging up with him I realized that was unacceptable and did not want this situation to be drawn out. I called him back and told him I needed him to come out tomorrow. He reluctantly agreed but not without giving me an attitude. It's now the next day and John shows up. He makes it apparent that he is not happy to be here and is acting like I am inconveniencing him. I show him the first set of misaligned posts. It was clear that he was looking for a way to justify the poor installation. He looked at the posts from every angle (I was shaking my head laughing at this point). After this completely ridiculous and insulting inspection he picks his head up and tells me that they lined up my gate to the neighbors fence (which by the way was crooked). I said why would they do something so stupid? He became defensive and tried to tell me that is one way to do it. I laughed in his face. I'm a fairly handy guy with common sense and I told him he was wrong and that is not how you set gate posts. You set them to where the owner wants the gate and you make sure both posts are aligned with one another. I said c'mon, you know that. He said "I don't know that". You own a fence company and you don't know how gate posts are to be installed? He made a similarly dumb statement about the other set of posts. I knew then that this is not an owner that takes responsibility and admits when his workers have made a mistake. Then we walked to the wood fence as he said with an attitude "what's wrong here"? I told him that wasn't grade a western red cedar. His response was that his invoice says grade 1a western red cedar. I asked him if that looks like grade "A" western red cedar. He said it was because that was all he ordered. I asked him again if that looks like grade 1 western red cedar he said he didn't know. He then told me grading wood wasn't his job, he puts up fences... Not very well obviously. So I asked him, you own a fencing company, probably close to half of your business is western red cedar fences, and you can't tell the difference in the grades of the woods. I told him a business owner in your position can't really plead ignorance. He told me he wasn't ignorant. ( He obviously doesn't know the definition of ignorance) . I wanted to walk him over to a table/cart I made to house my smoker. It was made out of grade 2 western red cedar from Menards. The cedar I bought at Menards was of much higher quality than what he supplied for my fence (that should not have been the case), When I offered to show him he refused to walk over to look at it. He reluctantly told me that he would remove the fence and give me my money back, which ultimately is what happened. John (the owner of First Fence) had an attitude with me the entire time, never admitted fault (although it was clear to me with the look on his faced that he got caught), and never apologized. I kept one of the small pieces of wood that was part of the horizontal board going across the top. I had a friend who is into woodworking/carpentry identify it as white cedar. I researched white cedar and it is much cheaper than western red cedar and it does not have all of the positive attributes of western red cedar, especially in standing up against the elements, and being rot and insect repellant. I know this was a long winded review, but I wanted to paint a clear picture of what kind of company this is and what kind of person owns it, I would not trust the owner (John) as far as I could throw him. He even admitted to me that he has been taken to court before due to the claims he has made about his wood (not smart). Don't walk, run from this company.

We originally talked with Kevin about our needs in spring of 2014. When we got back in touch this year, we determined we now wanted a PVC fence rather than wood. While Kevin was very knowledge about wood, he was unable to provide us with coherent information on PVC when he came out to our home this year. Rather than re-measuring or pulling up our old quote to base his new estimate on, he took a photo of last year's quote with his camera phone. And then called me the next day to ask me to scan and email the quote since he'd lost it. That should have been my first hint this wasn't going well. When I hadn't heard back from Kevin after a week, I emailed him asking for an update. He informed me he'd emailed a quote (which he hadn't), so I had to ask him to resend. The quote arrived as a photo taken from his camera, illegible and fuzzy. When I asked him for more information or a catalog of the styles he'd quoted from, he sent me more photos of the catalog taken with his camera, also fuzzy. At this point, I was starting to get frustrated and figured I could simply look check out their references to find the fence I wanted, since the installed product would probably be more informative than a fancy catalog. When I recontacted Kevin to try and finalize our quote, he told me he'd mixed up the numbers on estimate so what the price quotes was now different. And that there were 9 other leads in front of me, so he wouldn't get around to requoting for several days. I never did get something as simple as a catalog to understand what he was quoting me either, because at this point I told Kevin I'd be taking my business elsewhere. As a customer, I expect professionalism, reliability and transparency in the companies I choose to work with. Kevin Denney is not a sales person I would wish on anyone.

I chose first fence thru Angies list but was not impressed. Signed the contract on 7/13/14 for the new fence and gates to be installed. The crew arrived late which I was not happy about. Was promised that this company was the best in town by their representative Eric Andersen when he came to the house to give me the free estimate on 7/8/14. The work preformed did not match the hype. We also had a brand new garage built so the apron was brand new and was told that the crew would make a seamless job of installing the metal post for the gate. No such luck. They did a terrible job. They did try to fix it but its not seamless as promised. The double gates that were delivered were bent and the wrong size 4 times before finally getting them right. They also broke my walkway and just poured runny cement into the hole and it looked terrible because it ran into the grass. I was told it would be fixed in a professional manner. The person that came out each time to install the double gates was roberto. Nice guy very friendly but has a very bad memory for calling you back when asked to do so. The project was finally completed on 9/6/14. I was promised by roberto that i would receive a bean bag game for all my inconvenience. What a joke. After making multiple phone calls to roberto to remind him of his promise i finally received the bean bag game on saturday 10/11/2014. It took almost 2 months to install 45 feet of chain link fencing and 3 gates. I wouldn't recommend them. They were paid in full.

First Fence will build you the fence they want to build. Maybe it will even be the fence you want. This review was written by my husband, Brian. I own and rent out a townhome in the Brandywine complex in Villa Park. It had a very old fence around its back yard, built in the early 1980's. It had been built so heavy duty that one of the townhome employees joked that is was almost a fortress. But recently the tenant had complained that the fence gate was no longer functional, and I found the fence overall to be in bad shape. So I decided to get it fixed. I contacted First Fence in August, 2014, and began to work with their salesman. I described the situation and asked him to examine the fence and give me an estimate for replacing it. He emailed me a proposal and we discussed it over the phone. He offered an option to replace the existing fence with a different style, a single layer privacy fence. I refused, noting that the existing double layer fence (what he called a board-on-board fence) was built so heavily that it was actually much more private than the privacy fences around some of the neighbor's yards. He agreed and said they would build the same style of fence. So I signed the contract, got the permits, and scheduled the installation. After the new fence was built (on 2014/9/22), I went out to examine it. On the drive over, the neighbor of my townhome called me to complain that they had built a completely different new fence. When examined it, I found this to be true. It was of the "same style", but was a much lighter fence, and non-private. I called First Fence to complain. There were several phone calls with the salesman, during which he emphasized that I had gotten exactly the fence I had specified. And that perhaps I didn't understand it would look different because First Fence "uses higher quality, thicker boards". I eventually found photos of the old fence and compared them to the new fence and found what the real problem was (see attached photos). Measuring the old photos versus the contract shows that the primary difference between the fences is that the old fence had a two inch overlap on each side of each board, and the new fence was specified with only a 1/2 inch overlap. The result is a much lighter, non-private fence. So the salesman had written up the contract for a with fence very different measurements from the one being replaced. He never asked whether he should make these changes, never mentioned that he had made them, and never explained that the new fence would look very different from the old fence, despite my emphasis that I wanted a similar looking, very heavy duty, private fence. Since I'm not a fence builder, I did not understand the measurements in the contract (until my later research), and he never tried to explain them. He just said I was getting the same fence and I believed him. I escalated my complaint to First Fence's sales manager. We spoke several times, and then met at the fence to discuss. He informed me that this may have been resolved if I had met the salesman while he was taking measurements of the old fence. That is possibly true, but I don't believe it was my responsibility to measure the old fence. In short, he was completely unwilling to fix the fence, and placed the blame on me for not personally specifying the measurements in the contract, and for not understanding the differences between what the contract said and my previous fence. He emphasized that his company had built the fence that the contract specified, and that it was my fault the contract didn't specify the correct fence. After much disagreement, including threats from him to take me to court if I didn't complete payment on the new fence, he offered to either have me pay him an additional new fee to build another new fence (which he offered do for "little or no profit") or to give me a discount on my fence of 7.5%. He said correcting the new fence (at First Fence's expense), or any greater discount, was impossible because then First Fence would not make acceptable profit on the job. He also strongly implied that I was essentially trying to get a free fence from First Fence, and said that the fence they had built was a "perfectly acceptable, good fence". I was unsatisfied with the offered options, and choose to do no further business with First Fence. I informed the sales manager that I would post reviews online, which he said was fine. So I'm putting up reviews on various sites. I also called the townhome association and gave them an overview. The person I spoke with said that, although he didn't think the situation was worth trying a legal recourse for, it was the worst treatment by a fence contractor he had ever heard of, and he would make note of it to try to protect other consumers. Buyer beware. First Fence will build you the fence they want to build. Hope you like it, because they sure aren't going to make it right if you don't. November 20th, 2014 Update: Correcting for a few things in the in the November 4th response from First Fence: 1. I didn't ask for a 25% discount. I asked for that the fence be corrected to meet the original description verbally agreed on over the phone. They said that they would not make any modifications to the fence they had built, without additional payment. So the question was what discount would get me to drop the situation. I said 20% would get me to drop the complaint, even though I still didn't get the fence I thought was agreed to. They said that they would not make an acceptable level of profit if they gave a 20% discount, and offered 7.5% instead. I was not interested in this amount of discount. Basically, I would not have agreed to have the fence built like it is for 92.5% of the original price, so I didn't think it made sense to accept a similar discount. 2. I didn't refuse to meet the salesman at the old fence. I asked if we needed to meet, or if would be fine to do it over the phone. He said doing over the phone was no problem and would save me a trip. At the time, I thought that was very nice. If he had said we needed to meet to make sure the new fence was right, I would have been happy to do so.

First Fence was responsive and professional, and even willing to change the appointment time an hour earlier at the last minute to accommodate our schedule. Adam was knowledgeable and explained everything thoroughly. The price was in line with one of the other three estimates we got. It was a difficult decision and we easily could have chosen First Fence. If I need fencing in the future I will certainly consider First Fence.

Fantastic. We met with Dan who came out to the house. He took his time, was not showy or pushy but very helpful. Dan helped us pick out options for our gates that would fit the area best. He submitted the paperwork right away to get our order fulfilled as soon as possible. It took about 4 weeks to have to fence installed as per ordering of the materials and scheduling. Pricing was right on. In fact they came in lower priced of the three vendors I had provide a quote. The fence was installed tester and looks fantastic! Quality is second to none! We are so pleased with the quality and craftsmanship of the installers. Which were very courteous and very professional. They worked so hard! It shows too! We had 1/3 of the yard fenced as our neighbors to the back and side already have their wood fence up. Let me tell you, the quality and beauty of our fence from First Fence blows theirs away! I am considering having First Fence finish off the yard to cover the neighbors fences up and just to make it more cohesive. I highly recommend Dan and his team at First Fence! You will not be disappointed!

The work was done quickly and professionally. Unfortunately, due to the rainy summer, they had to reschedule to another day, however, they called in plenty of time so that we weren't waiting around. They came on the rescheduled day and completed the work to our satisfaction.

WORKERS WERE INSTRUCTED TO SHOW UP EARLY AM FOR A HALF-DAY JOB TO BE COMPLETED IN A FEW HOURS. THEY ASKED PERMISSION TO USE MY WATER AND ELECTRIC, WHICH I THOUGHT WAS CONSIDERATE WHEN OTHER CONTRACTORS JUST HELP THEMSELVES. TWO WORKERS SHOWED UP ON TIME AND INSTALLED POSTS - CITY INSPECTER CHECKED HOLES BEFORE CONCRETE POURS AND WE WERE ALL SET. JOB SUDDENLY STOPPED BECAUSE THE WORKERS WERE WAITING FOR EQUIPMENT OR SOMETHING AND NOW SAID THEY CANNOT FINISH TODAY AND IT WOULD HAVE TO BE SATURDAY OR MONDAY AND THE JOB COULD NOT BE FINISHED IN HALF DAY AS THEY PROMISED. I INSISTED I WANTED THE JOB FINISHED AS PROMISED AND SEVERAL HOURS LATER, THEY CREW SHOWED UP WITH WHAT THEY NEEDED TO COMPLETE THE JOB LATE EVENING. THE FENCE LOOKED GREAT AND ALTHOUGH IT WAS A VERY LONG DAY, I WAS VERY HAPPY WITH THE RESULT. THERE WERE A FEW HICCUPS, BUT I WOULD FEEL COMFORTABLE USING FIRST FENCE AGAIN AND REFERRING THEM.

It went very good. They are very nice to work with and do excellent work.

It was fine. I will call them in the future if I have any fence repairs.

Came promptly to give quote. Very professionally delivered. Job was done on time with total satisfaction. Very nice people to deal with from sales to service staff. Fence will now last for many more years. When need further work in future will call First Fence.

they were excellent. I am very satisfied with my 5 foot chain link fence.

So far its been a pleasure we are not completed in full yet...but this is our choice. We need the rest of the work done from another company.

Very good did all work with top material and workmanship. Very happy with job and price. The two men (Miguel and?) were great and new their business. Would Highly recommed.

Did a great job removing old fence and all the old materials. Installed new fence perfectly. Totally satisfied with work including cleanup.

The service representative who came out to the house was very professional. They were able to perform the job earlier like we requested. They finished in 1 day but we had to call them back to redo a part of one of the gates because the craftsmanship was poor and the post didn't line up in order for the door to close. They came out and redid the work and replaced some panels that we requested which were cracked. The end result was a beautiful fence.

I would definitely use this company again and recommend them to others.