Garden gate

A tense stand-off, but they're doing better.

Background

With a very curious dog, and a soon usable garden space, I decided we needed a more robust gate on the garden entrance.

Design

The design requirements for the gate were specific, but fairly simple. I wanted to use up some of the disassembled pallet wood we had, it needed to be able to be hinged from the remainder of the wall, it needed to withstand our dog's curiosity.

I researched some basic gate shapes, and settled on this one. The dimensions were based on my laying some wood on the ground and measuring where the hinges could go, which was quite limiting given the space of the remaining wall and the state of it (somewhat degraded).

Implementation

After laying it all out on the floor and working out how screw all the pieces together given the screw lengths and hardware I had, it looked like this. The wood was mostly taken from a pallet we had disassembled, with only two pieces being new lumber. The hardest part was genuinely getting the angles right on the cross braces.

Then it was time to paint, so I took advantage of the nice weather. Javert helped.

Of course the color selection is quite limited because of the historic monument nearbye. I am required to comply with the local PLU. Have a look at what colours are allowed on exterior woodwork. So this is the paint I chose which complies and it looks okay. It blends with the surroundings nicely, and it should help protect the wood for a bit longer than using nothing.

 And then there were the hinges. I ordered this set from amazon just at the start of the covid-19 confinement, right when Amazon was being flooded with orders. So my 2-day shipping turned into a week, but they did eventually arrive and are very solid.

  Then came the hard part: attaching the hinges. In the end, the remains of the wall did not look sturdy enough to anchor into directly with the hinges. So I made a post to attach the hinges onto and anchored that to the wall, hoping the post would take more of the abuse off the wall. We added some construction adhesive between the post and the wall, leaned a heavy rock against it, and left if overnight to dry with the gate propped up to minimize the pressure on the hinges and their new fastenings.

A few days later, I saw a roll of plastic-coated chicken wire at the grocery store and thought, that is the perfect finish to keep Javert in the yard. So we stapled it onto the garden side (inside) of the gate.

 Result

The photo at the top of this post perfectly demonstrates the function I wanted to have from this gate. There is Javert in the garden looking out at the neighbour's cat. She is secure, cannot give chase, but can still see the world and "talk" to passing neighbours who tell her what a good girl she is. We should be able to use this gate for as long as we need to. It is solid, swings nicely on the hinges, and looks good.

Resources

• The Renovation Couple: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XM_dtSGMx4o
• Pinterest
• Google