Most homeowners don’t hide their feelings when it comes to maintaining a wood fence.

Homeowners despise the annual ordeal that forces them to repaint, replace or shore up cracked or rotted timbers.

But now, fence fans can kiss dreaded maintenance goodbye. New vinyl fences are seeing to that.

The vinyl fence industry accounts for $600 million in annual residential fence sales, up from $10 million as recently 1990. And those numbers will only rise, rise, rise as homeowners get a taste of free weekends away from fence upkeep.

“We don’t see any slowdown in vinyl fence sales in the next five to seven years,” says John Harsch of Kroy, a vinyl fence manufacturer and a supplier to The Home Service Store. “We’ll grow at least 25 percent a year as we have for the last seven or eight years.”