Fence & Deck Repair in Menlo Park

• Side and rear yards: 7 feet maximum — a foot more than neighboring Palo Alto or Los Altos allow.
• Front setback area: 4 feet maximum.
• Anything taller requires a use permit under Chapter 16.82; properties fronting Santa Cruz Avenue have their own exception procedure (§16.64.030).

The city's own guidance warns about this directly: in much of Menlo Park, the public right-of-way extends past the curb and sidewalk into what looks like your front landscaping. The curb is not your property line, and — the city is explicit on this — your neighbors' fences are not a reliable guide either, because plenty of them are in the wrong place. The city's handout describes measuring from the street's gutter-to-gutter width against the recorded right-of-way to locate the true line. If you're rebuilding a front or corner fence rather than repairing it in place, this is worth an hour of checking before any posts go in.

Repairing an existing fence — posts, boards, gate hardware — in its existing location is straightforward and doesn't reopen the property-line question. That's a real advantage of repair over replacement here: an old fence in a slightly wrong spot is usually a legal nonconforming structure, but rebuild it from scratch and it has to be right.

The failure pattern is the same across the Peninsula's irrigated lots: posts rot in the few inches around the soil line, where moisture and oxygen meet. Above ground the wood dries; below, there's too little oxygen for rot to thrive. That's why a fence can look solid and still lean after one storm. Decks fail differently — the most common serious problem is joist rot where the deck meets the house, a spot you can't see without looking underneath.

Send photos through the form — the base of the posts, the full fence line, underside of the deck if you can reach it — and get a repair estimate range before anyone drives out.