Custom Western Red Cedar Batten Fences | Twin Cities Installation
For homeowners searching for a heavy-duty, visually striking perimeter that offers total privacy, a standard flat board fence can feel a bit underwhelming. Over time, standard wood privacy fences can also suffer from boards shrinking and splitting due to intense weather shifts, exposing your yard to the neighborhood.
The structural solution to this issue is a custom wood batten privacy fence—often referred to as a board and batten design. By using dimensional overlapping layers, this style creates a deep, textured board-on-board look that ensures your backyard remains completely hidden from view while presenting a highly robust profile.
Fence Man Dan’s Verdict: “A lot of people love the rustic, estate-style look of a batten fence, but they don’t realize how structurally tough it is. We place wide, heavy-duty 1×6 Western Red Cedar boards side-by-side, and then we fasten a narrower wood strip—a batten—directly over every single seam. This intentional overlapping completely seals the cracks. Even when the wood naturally shrinks during our dry Minnesota winters, those battens act as a permanent shield so you never get those annoying vertical gaps.”
Have us contact you
The Batten Advantage: Superior Depth and Dimensional Strength
A custom batten privacy fence offers distinct physical and stylistic advantages over basic, mass-market alternatives:
1. Robust Dimensional Shadow Lines
Because the vertical battens project outward from the underlying boards, this fence style creates beautiful, deep shadow lines that shift throughout the day as the sun moves. It adds an architectural texture and rustic warmth to your property that a flat, single-layer privacy fence simply cannot replicate.
2. Identical “Good Neighbor” Framing
At Midwest Fence, our local fabrication shop trims and mirrors the structural framing components so that your batten fence presents a clean, premium look from both sides. You get an exceptionally strong boundary wall, and your neighbors get a beautiful view, making it an ideal choice for shared residential property lines.
3. Secured with Premium Fasteners—Never Staples
Because a board and batten system uses layered lumber, it naturally carries more physical weight than a standard single-layer fence. Budget contractors frequently use cheap construction staples to speed up assembly, which inevitably rust out and cause boards to warp or detach under stress. Midwest Fence builds every single panel using premium Stainless Steel or Hot-Dipped Galvanized ring-shank nails that permanently lock the layers together and never leave ugly black chemical streaks.
Premium Wood Batten Fence Specifications
To help you compare your options confidently, here is how the Midwest Fence manufacturing and installation blueprint stands up against standard retail alternatives:
| Technical Feature | Midwest Fence Standard | Standard Industry Alternative |
| Lumber Species | 100% Premium Western Red Cedar | Low-Grade Treated Pine or Mixed Whitewoods |
| Seam Protection | Heavy-Duty Overlapping Vertical Battens | Unprotected Butt-Jointed Edges (Prone to Gapping) |
| Fastener Type | Ring-Shank Stainless Steel or Hot-Dipped Galvanized Nails | Brittle Construction Staples or Drywall Screws |
| Post System Option | DuraCedar™ Posts (Patented Rot Protection) | Standard Untreated Wood Posts |
| Foundation Type | Deep-Set Concrete Footings (Below the 42″ Frost Line) | Shallow Driven Soil Stakes / No-Dig Pipes |
Local Twin Cities Authority: Engineered for Minnesota Ground
Whether you are looking for a classic picket fence in Edina or a heavy-duty privacy fence in Woodbury, our wood fences are built for the local soil. Minnesota’s severe freeze-thaw cycles subject underground footings to massive shifting forces known as frost heave. If a contractor takes a shortcut and fails to dig below the local frost line, the winter ground will literally choke the post and push it upward, destroying your investment.
At Midwest Fence, we dig every main structural post deep into the earth and anchor them with massive concrete foundations to ensure your fence line remains perfectly plumb, straight, and level for decades. We invite you to visit our 7-Acre South St. Paul Showroom to see these premium wood privacy styles in full-scale before you buy.
To ensure your heavy-duty board and batten panels are anchored to an underground foundation engineered to withstand immense winter ground movement and wind loads, read our complete technical breakdown: Deep-Set Concrete vs. Driven Posts: Why MN Fences Fail.
