At the bottom of the garden...

Friday was another cold day, and that morning was already in the diary to go and replace a gate, so at 7am when I looked out of the window there was snow blowing around in the wind, only a light sprinkling...but you never know


I got to the house and there was an area cleared for me to build up the gate. Tools first, my little car was full of all types of things I may need..

The next thing to do was clear a bit more space and start dismantling the old gate. The strap hinges were lovely, a fair bit of wear on them, but still more than adequate for the size of gate that they were going to support.

I got to work on removing the hinges from the old gate and was pleasantly surprised that the screws came out quite well, no chewed up slots helped and the rust from screw to hinge didn't slow it down either. In a short time the gate was off and lent against the wall.

I had already cut the timbers to length (plus 30mm), run the ledges and brace through the saw and put a few degrees on the edges to stop any water standing. I'd also cut the diagonal brace ends on my cross-cut, to save more time. So, it appeared that this gate was only going to take a few minutes, but I did give it a head start. I placed the old gate on top of the new, pencilled a line around the gate plus a couple of millimetres and cut the head shape (plus a bit)..

With the gate assembled I held it up to the wall, fixed through the strap hinges into the gate and got to see how it was looking, I had to plane a bit off either side, but on the whole it was pretty good. Some more shaping to the top to get the curved top similar shape to the brickwork and it was looking great.

The bolts were a bit of fun, an outside bolt was on, so if they went through the gate for a walk they could lock the garden behind them. A good idea I thought, so that one went on first, the inside was a bit trickier. I had to put another ledge on the gate to get the bolt to work in the old holes, so it had to fit up to the brace, and to make it look right I added the one the other side later. But the bolt wasn't too much trouble and the padlock still fitted too..

The bolts were held on with some of those bolts that we all seem to have a few of... Sometimes in an old ice cream tub or box, plenty of different sizes...and I managed to use half a dozen bolts, nuts and washers, so that felt good, and does save some money too. We did have to get some more bolts for the heavy end of the strap hinges... and guess what.. a couple more left over...

Job done..

And still there was the occasional flurry of snow in the wind...

 All the best

Jamie