Ideal Fence

Ideal Fence is a fence yard as much as a fence contractor. The Watertown shop on Pleasant Street will install your cedar privacy fence, and it will also sell you the posts and rails to build it yourself — in July 2026 a customer who is a contractor himself wrote that Brigitte, Eddie and Mark tracked down replacement parts for a discontinued fence line and showed him how to fabricate the pieces he couldn't buy. The brothers Eddie and Mark Nilan own it and say on their own site that they have run it since 1983, deliberately staying at one location rather than expanding. BBB, which has had a file on the company since November 1985 and lists ten employees, gives it an A+ — though the company is explicitly not BBB accredited, which are two separate facts. Their stated territory is the inner-ring towns west of Boston: Watertown, Newton, Waltham, Belmont, Brookline, Cambridge, Lexington, Wellesley, Weston, Allston. What the reviews are consistently good at is speed and access to Eddie. In a January 2026 review, a real-estate agent described a storm-downed fence: called Tuesday morning, quote in hand by 3 PM the same day, old fence removed and new one installed by Friday. Another customer, writing in June 2026, went from a first meeting with Eddie to installation by a crew led by Junior and called the price fair and the workmanship excellent. A 2023 reviewer with a steeply terraced back yard got a custom cedar fence and praised the crew for being neat and detail-oriented. Across 42 Google ratings the average sits at 3.7, and the last six months have brought four reviews with no complaints among them. That 3.7 exists because the low reviews are pointed rather than vague. An August 2025 reviewer said posts on a six-year-old fence had rotted because the wood was set directly into concrete, and reported being told 'that's the way we've done it for 40 years' when they asked for a fix. A 2022 customer said a $4,500 deposit was cashed and then went weeks without a callback establishing a start date. Two separate 2022 reviewers, on Google and on Houzz, used the same word — belligerent — about how a dispute was handled; the company posted a detailed public rebuttal to the Houzz one. A 2022 two-star review itemised quote errors and a fence installed with a noticeable tilt around a tree, and a March 2024 reviewer said an estimate appointment was cancelled without notice after a confirmation call went unanswered. The pattern worth reading is that the praise clusters around jobs that went to plan quickly and the complaints cluster around what happens when something goes wrong. Get the scope, the post-setting method and the start date written down before you pay a deposit, and ask specifically how they set posts. Massachusetts does not require home improvement contractor registration for fencing-only work, so the absence of one here is normal.