The Backyard Gate Saga
When we moved into this rental five years ago, we were given pretty free rein to make it suitable for us. Being us, and there being a medium busy highway just outside the front door, the first thing it needed was a backyard that kept cats IN. We spent around AUD$3.5k buying wire mesh, posts, cement, and on a handyman to do most of the work, but we ended up with 25m x 15m backyard enclosure and a secured side gate as well. This gate will be referred to as the 'Bastard Gate' from here on.
That served us for four years, but then a new landlord decided to split our block and we had to pull it down and were basically stuffed for recovering the money. (That's one reason I HATE the "real estate" system, it's just bullshit. It's a really crap system and needs to be replaced by something better. We used up our life savings to build that fence and a shed for storage - quite literally all we had in the bank - and yeah this happened.)
So our back yard shrank dramatically, but the landlord was also kind and nice enough that he built paling fences around the new tiny backyard AND our front yard for us. Which is nice because I was able to add cat-climb preventers to those fences, we've been able to let the cats roam from the front to the back yard with cat doors in place, and they really don't need as much space as people think they need if you engage them with play and interactions regularly, which we do. We're a cat's dream as far as food, lodgings, and interactivity go. And life was peachy all around. Until that side gate fell down for the second time . . .
The Gate Problem
The Bastard Gate was added by the OG owner who was a builder by trade, and "physician heal thyself" applies in spades with them... The Bastard Gate was attached completely plumb level to the laundry outbuilding. And then made to swing outwards onto a steadily rising driveway, which meant that it lifted away from the laundry at the bottom, with a huge 2m leverage. The first time it fell down was when the lawns got done, Russ the mowing guy opened it to take his mower back to his vehicle, closed the Bastard Gate, went to drive off - heard a crash, and looked back to see the Bastard Gate flat on the ground - with a cat venturing out to see what was going on...
Russ immediately scooped the cat (this is why he's more our friend than 'that mower guy' and comes around for the odd coffee between his jobs) and propped the Bastard Gate across the entrance, called me to come see, and we re-fitted it. The next day I made a spacer (Hi Ivan!) block for the bottom so that the Bastard Gate got lifted as it swung, which removed a lot of the torsion effect. This is what should have been done in the first place, a simple 15mm spacer. Builders. Argh.
But the Bastard Gate fell over again a few months later when the top attachment screws also pulled out due to the constant flexing, and this time I made plans to replace it with a less inappropriate design. Spoke to the nice landlord and asked if I could do it, and even submitted a plan to him.
Yep just Tinkercad, yep very basic, and yep - Elvis. I think that actually sold it to the landlord, and he went so far as to provide leftover palings and some other bits from his work on his other places. As it turns out enough palings to do the whole side plus a two spares.
Plans Grow
While I was at it I also planned to put a parcel delivery hatch in the gate, a basic double-door design that prevents parcel retrieval from outside. Our current parcel delivery is a 55litre plastic tub in plain sight on the driveway because we can't trust delivery people to shut gates behind them, and we'd rather risk losing a parcel than losing a cat.
First Things First
The parcel hatch will be easy enough to do once the fence and gate panels are up so making those has taken most of my time. I decided to do a very short panel at the laundry building, and swing the gate INWARD from that so it doesn't have to cope with a sloping driveway. And also so it matches the landlord's front yard gate which has proven very reliable and should make him happy.
The fence palings are 180cm same as the rest of the fences, and I've used 210cm posts so I can run a board across them near the top to keep them steady, that will be high enough to allow almost anything to be brought in and out through.
The gate is a touch over 90cm wide (because that way I don't have to ripsaw any palings into narrower strips) the laundry side panel is barely 20cm and the house side panel is 76cm.
Look - opening that 1.80m heavy gate uphill - supported on a ridiculous castor wheel to cope with the rising ground - was a job for two grown men and a team of sled dogs, it wobbled and flexed and nails and screws regularly popped out of it. It regularly trapped unsuspecting people's hands and left them with bruised nails and knuckles. It won't be missed by anyone.
So here are the three panels:
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| The laundry side panel |
The smallest panel has just one wide and two narrow palings. You can see the Bastard Gate to the left, with its wire to keep the cats in, added cord to stop another escape route - oh, and my shed behind it.
(That's another story. I said the rest of our savings had been spent on a shed, well it was a new kit shed and we paid to have a concrete pad cast and set - all the fruit - and then it too had to be taken down and no recompense for it was ever mentioned. So I jammed it across the driveway behind the laundry, had to completely bastardise it in the process, but you know, I'd HAD IT with the disruptions and destruction of our property by then. Much more cordial now because we've become friendly and have an understanding. So fingers crossed we'll be here for decades and may as well make it comfortable for us.)
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| The house side panel, and our current parcel delivery crate. |
More of the Bastard Gate at the right this time, and our otherwise wide open to theft parcel delivery at the foot of it. You'll notice the left side is missing palings, this is because I'll have to make nicely-hidden attachment points into the house and that'll be easier to do without having to reach around corners.
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| ...and the gate panel, still with bracings attached. |
The gate. It still has two boards attached, that held it at the right height for fitting the hinges prior to putting all the parts back together.
Notes And Gotchas
There's a few things with the design. You can see that the driveway's old concrete. It's hard as steel in places with large aggregate added to make it cheaper. (Builder habits again...) But the bottom rail has to be fixed, and it can't just be a continuous length from side to side because that's a trip hazard and also makes moving things almost impossible.
But I've left the posts 2.1m tall so that I can run a board across the top to stop wobbles, and that's all set up ready to go and won't get in the way of most uses of the gate.
Then too this area is a low point and rain floods it from the driveway which is, as previously said, higher than the back concreted area.
The Moved Shed features a covered area out the back, and to save its posts from sitting in water, I cut squares of an ordinary HDPE kitchen cutting board and slipped them under each post as we bolted them down. So I've cut some more, smaller, squares and drilled a hole in them, and will stack two, two stacks under each panel, to raise everything 8mm above the cement and let water just run through.
And I've drilled holes in the bottom rails near each end, Once the panels go in place I'll mark the spots, use a hammer drill to make shallow holes. When the panels go back, I have some masonry bolts, will whack some epoxy into each hole and hammer the bolts down into them then let it all set, cut the bolt shafts flush on the inside. The theory being that with the two outer ends fixed to solid structures and a few bolts into the gound on the inner edges of the panels, they'll never lift UP out of the holes and so will stay in place.
Also, it was a hot day, Pickle wanted to make sure I was doing things right, and so I had to make a sun tent for him.
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| Pickle 'supervising' me. |
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| Here you can see the Bastard Gate in all its glory. |
Landlord has been promising to move the gas bottles out to the outer wall but for the moment they're far enough away from the new fence/gate to allow me to fit the parcel hatch as well.
Anyway - that's ONE of the reasons why I've been a bit quiet in recent times. There are more, stay tuned!
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