Showerthought: everyone in Denver says skip the permit for a fence, but the guy at the Baker garage sale changed my mind | Denver Home Improvement - SMM Buzz
Showerthought: everyone in Denver says skip the permit for a fence, but the guy at the Baker garage sale changed my mind
A guy running a garage sale on South Broadway two summers back overheard my wife and me talking about putting up a 6 foot privacy fence and just went off on us, in a nice way. He said he built fences for 22 years and had three clients on his own block get busted after neighbors reported them, and one of those fines ran $2,500 plus the cost of ripping it all out. I always figured Denver permits were just busywork since half the yards around me have fences that look older than the houses. So I pulled the permit, paid the fee, and the whole thing actually went through in under two weeks. Now I get weirdly annoyed when people on here say just build it and nobody will care, because somebody on your block absolutely will care. Did any of you get a letter or a fine over a project you thought was no big deal?
Figured out the hard way that "nobody will care" is a lie people tell themselves when they don't want to pay the fee. What got me was that it wasn't even the city driving around looking for violations, it was somebody on his own block who turned him in. So when you say a neighbor will care, was it a fence height thing or did you go over the setback line? And did the inspector actually come out and measure, or did the permit office just rubber stamp it because you filed the paperwork? Because if the whole two week thing was mostly about having the paper in hand, that changes how I think about every other project I've been putting off.