Posts, rails, boards, lattice — a wood fence is a short list of pressure-treated lumber cut to a few sizes. Here’s the complete fencing-lumber list, and how to buy it by the piece.
If you search “fencing lumber,” you’re really shopping for four or five specific pieces — the posts, the rails, the boards, and the bits that finish them. A wood fence isn’t one product; it’s a short list of pressure-treated lumber cut to a few standard sizes. Here’s the complete list, what each piece does, the sizes that matter, and how to buy it by the piece instead of by the unit on a membership.
The posts are the fence: everything else hangs off them, and they’re the part that lives in the ground, so they’re the piece to get right. A standard residential fence runs 4×4 posts on 8-foot centres. Length follows depth — in the GTA you’re setting roughly 48 inches down to clear frost, so a 6-foot fence wants an 8-foot post (48 inches buried, six feet up, the rest is reveal and cut); step up to a 10-foot post for a taller fence or a deeper set. Use 6×6 posts at the gates and corners, where the leverage is highest — a gate hangs its whole weight off one post, and a 6×6 won’t rack. Posts are ground-contact rated, a heavier treatment than the boards, because they’re the only part touching soil. How deep, and concrete versus gravel, is its own decision — that’s in how deep to set a fence post in Ontario.
The rails are the horizontal frame the boards fasten to: two for most fences (top and bottom), three on a taller run or a heavier board. A 6-foot fence section spans 8 feet between posts, so the workhorse is a brown pressure-treated 2×4 in 8-foot lengths. Ours is premium and kiln-dried, so the frame goes up straight and stays straight instead of twisting a rail off the line as it dries down.
The pickets are what everyone sees, and they’re where a premium board pays for itself. A 1×6 fence board covers the run; a 6-foot fence uses the 6-foot board, a 4- or 5-foot fence the 5-foot cut. This is the piece we’re most particular about — kiln-dried and above-ground rated, with the brown colour built into the treatment, so it doesn’t cup, twist and gap the way a wet green board does through its first summer. The full case for premium over commodity is in premium versus standard pressure-treated.
A lattice-top fence crowns the solid section with a strip of lattice for light and air; a 1×8 pressure-treated lattice strip does that job. Nailing strips — the thin furring pieces — fasten boards and lattice to the frame. Neither is the star of the fence, but leaving them off the list is how you end up back at the yard mid-build.
The quick estimator, per 8-foot section: one post (plus one extra to close the end of the whole run), two to three 2×4 rails, and enough 1×6 boards to cover eight feet — about sixteen butted tight, fewer if you’re spacing them for a shadowbox. So a 40-foot fence is five sections: six posts, ten to fifteen rails, and roughly eighty boards. Multiply by the per-piece price on each product page and you’ve built your material cost before anyone quotes you. The labour side — usually the bigger half of an installed fence — is in what a wood fence actually costs in the GTA.
The big boxes sell all of this too — by the unit, on a membership, priced to the shelf. We sell the same fencing lumber by the piece, factory-direct from the Bolton yard and priced below the big box: one board or a thousand, no account, no bulk-only minimum. It’s the same premium brown stock we build our own fence panels from — which is the other way to buy: if you’d rather skip the board-by-board build, the panels arrive finished and drop between your posts. Either way, the full fencing-lumber list sits on the pressure-treated page with every per-piece price, and a full-run bulk quote is a call to 647-569-2163.
