Kiss Me Over the Garden Gate

Ever since I moved into my house, I've known that the gate to the backyard would need to be replaced. The post that the original chain link gate latched onto was sagging drunkenly, and I'd thought it was rotting at the base. (When I pulled it out, it turned out to just have been sunk into very soft soil, and had slowly fallen toward the anchored side until the gate couldn't reach it to latch.) I also just prefer wood fencing, despite the extra maintenance it requires.

The project finally came together, after a period of collecting wood and other materials, when I claimed the gate my dad had built for the basement stairs when my sister was an infant. We've had it in the garage for years, and it's still in beautiful shape, so it just needed a very thorough coat of paint to give it a chance against the elements.

It's...the Levi-gate!

To figure out where to put the posts for the gate, and how much fencing I'd need, I propped the gate up in the space between my house and the corner of my neighbor's fence, and spent a bunch of time looking at it, running through it, looking at it some more, running back through it.

Featuring serendipitous Husker block from my parents' new house.

There was also some contemplation of how to orient the gate for most usefulness/minimal potential to squash plants or block the neighbors' gate.

Hashtag: engineering.

Dad came over to help set the posts for the gate, providing crucial Engineer Advice and also doing a lot of the digging (thanks, Dad!) with the spud bar we've used to dig a lot of holes and pry a lot of big damn rocks out of the dirt. So far, in a turn of events I could not have even dreamt of, my yard appears to be gloriously rich clay loamish, with no big rocks lurking. I may now have doomed myself by saying that publicly.

Dad and I got as far as attaching the vertical support for the cross beams of the fence to the chain link corner, using the same clamps meant to hitch the netting bit of a chain link fence to the posts and great long bolts that would pass through the clamp and the board, but the rest of the construction had to wait a day for the concrete to set up. After watching my clothesline poles lever themselves up and out of the ground from insufficient concreting, I've gotten cautious about stressing posts in the ground until I'm certain they're staying put.

Meanwhile, Mom got all but about four feet of the border garden I've been very, very slowly installing prepped with cardboard underlayment and a thick carpet of compost over the flipped sod. She's a superhero, and I can't wait to stuff that garden with plants next spring.

We don't need no stinkin' OSHA.

My woodshop is...

Well.

It's Spartan, which is to say it has minimal frills and is also likely to cause physical and emotional distress because of that lack of frillage.

I didn't lose any toes (or fingers, or blood, actually) cutting the rest of the fence pieces to length, though there was some weird jury-rigging as usual; in this case, I'm cutting a wee block to brace the horizontal beam against the vertical board attached to the side of my garage.

I love beautiful woodwork. This is very not an example.

Because the angle looks like this, and my first thought was to add a wedge to fill the space between the horizontal and the vertical and screw through all three pieces. You might already know this, but doing that while two-thirds of the pieces are just hovering in the air, using a drill that doesn't like driving screws, has extremely low odds for success.

Obviously, I went a different route, gently chiseling away the intersecting corner of the horizontal until it fit more closely against the vertical, and then drilling some really weird pilot holes. While unbeautiful, it worked, and I knew the fence boards would hide my clumsy jointing anyway.

It's the Laundry Portal, what can I say?

I picked up a fence panel from a pile of giveaway wood elsewhere in town, with enough assistance from another dude doing the same thing that I honestly should've paid him (he was smart and brought a saw in case the wood didn't fit in his car. I...didn't). Ripping the boards off their anchors wasn't the easiest thing I've ever done, but it wasn't horrid, especially since that had been a 6-foot fence, and I only needed about 3.5 feet to match the height of the chain link fence. I had almost enough panels from that fence, but came up slightly short on the garage side—evenly spacing the fence panels would've left me with something like a 4-inch gap. While not likely to be a problem from a pet-escape perspective, that definitely would've become a rabbit highway, and I didn't want to end up with a dog headlocked in the fence from trying to rocket through after one.

I ended up stealing a board just the right size from one of the many pallets I've been gifted by a friend who works with a lot of warehouses. It's not meant for outdoor fencing, but it'll probably last as long as the much-used recycled fence boards will.

While I was trimming fence boards and installing them, I was also finishing up the paint work on the gate, having sanded it to scuff the original, flat indoor paint.

And no crushed fingers to show for it.

Hinges swapped, to make the pickets on the gate match the pickets on the fence while retaining the swing direction I prefer. I know it looks like the gate is hung completely crookedly, and I'm blaming it partly on perspective...and partly on the ground not being level. It's fine. It swings well and looks grand from every other angle...

I was slightly tempted to leave it this way. It almost looks whitewashed.

Primer on! I did this very late in the day, and my hands were horrible frozen claws by the time I was done. I also realized I probably should have primed and painted each layer of fence as I went, rather than constructing the whole thing and being unable to reach the bits of the posts and planks that overlapped each other. I managed to slap enough paint on to cover most of the exposed wood, although I was scraping the rim of the (salvaged-from-the-discount-rack) can by the time I'd finished.

Sorry for the backlighting.

The actual paint went on beautifully, and I believe I painted slightly less of myself that round. I know the posts look a bit silly now, but they'll be lovely when I get the second set installed and add the framework for the climbing rose I've planted in the corner to scramble over.

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