Our garden gate was broken, had been for some time. Stalactites of rotten wood dangled from just below the lower, cross member – what a delightful name for a piece of wood, like an angry, red-faced Member of Parliament shouting at the Speaker! Its alternative name – ‘cross brace’ – is less exotic but a bit more usefully descriptive.
Most ‘door-sized’ garden gates have an ‘upper’ and a ‘lower’ cross member, they hold together the vertical planks of the gate – which, by the way, are called ‘fence boards’. Anyway, the rot had reached the angry MP, his lower edge was decaying.
I’ve made running-repairs to the gate a couple of times in the past but, finally, something had to be done before it fell off its hinges.
The little car that normally lives in the garage was in a care-home, temporarily, so the garage was empty and eminently suitable to host the garden gate and the wood sculptor. (The car which is classified as my car has to live out in the rain, all the time, poor thing.)
I erected two work-benches in tandem in the empty garage.
Estimated time for gate repair? One day.
I took out the electric drill, rigged it into screw-driver mode and began. I was surprised that the screws affixing the gate to the hinges, (or the hinges to the gate?) came out quite easily, they’d been there for at least twenty years to my certain knowledge.
I had, untypically, had the foresight to slide a thin piece of wood under the gate before removing the screws so it didn’t immediately fall down, but then I had to carry it to the garage and lift it onto the work benches. It was heavy! I struggled a bit. ‘Probably waterlogged’ I thought secretly. I didn’t mention that in public though because of the risk of being sent out into the Covid 19 jungle to buy a new door.
The first job was to cut off the rotten bits. I grabbed the long saw, the silver-coloured one with the red handle, lined it up with the top of the lower cross member and began to saw with gusto. The saw jumped out of the groove it had just cut and landed on my left forefinger. ‘Ouch’ I said enthusiastically and loudly enough for the nurse to come running with a plaster. After a suitable period of convalescence with cups of sweet tea served by the same nurse, I returned to the garden gate and operated the saw a little more carefully.
The lower cross member fell to the floor and the remains of the lower parts of the fence boards disintegrated as I pulled them off.
My plan was simple: cut fence board extensions to the correct length and attach them to a new cross member which would be wide enough to be screwed across the bottoms of the still existing fence boards. I had some unused Danish-oak floorboards, had them for years, too good to throw away but unused for want of a floor missing half-a-dozen Danish-oak floorboards.
I carefully measured the width of the old cross member and marked off where the first cut would be made on the first length of oak.
At this point I doubled my estimate of how long it would take to mend the gate. It was getting dark and, despite the long, fluorescent light in the garage, the dark was creeping in, making accurate saw cuts more difficult to achieve.
I parked the tools, carefully noting where each one was before turning the light off and closing the garage door.
I could look forward to a successful tomorrow.
The day started with a light breakfast and the prospect of cleaning up and painting the newly repaired gate.
I whistled my happy way down the garden path, opened the garage and turned on the light just to add a little to what Mr Sun was pouring onto my bit of the world at that moment.
I placed the oak board on the bench-hook and began to cut where I’d marked the evening before. There were six to be cut. Of course, the first one is easy, the second and following pieces have to be exactly the same length. I cut them all carefully and, lo and behold, they all lined up perfectly, there was just one that protruded a little from the perfect line but a few minutes with the sanding block resolved that. There was one more small piece to be added as the six lengths I’d cut didn’t quite make the full width. Even that one fitted.
I offered them up to the bottom edge of the now, much-shorter gate…
Next instalment tomorrow:
or the next day,
or the day after that…..
……
Perfect.
I laid them, carefully held together, on top of the ‘table’ created by the gate lying across the two work-benches. I cut a thinnish strip of wood to the length of the width – if you get what I mean – and drilled and screwed it to the six-and-a-bit fence board extensions so that, effectively, it was one, homogenous bit of gate.
Now, one bit of the make-up of a gate that I haven’t yet told you about is the diagonal member. That sounds a bit ‘parliamentish’ too! like a Cross-Bencher leaving one side of the chamber and walking diagonally across the floor to the other side, like the middle bit of a ‘Z’. On a gate the diagonal member is there to keep the fence boards in their place. And, although my new extension would fit below the lower end of our gate’s diagonal member, the new cross member – that I would have to fit, in order to join the now homogenous fence board extensions to the existing, now shortened, fence boards – would need to be shaped so that the inner, or hinge-end would be a ‘wrap-around-the-lower-end-of-the diagonal-member’ fit. You’d probably already realised that.
I made a template out of a piece of cardboard and laid it on the end of the chosen, about-to-be-the-lower-cross-member plank. Carefully I sawed out the shape of the lower end of the diagonal member, offered it up to the cut-off bottom of the gate, and it fitted perfectly.
Technical note: within the meaning of the term ‘offered it up to’ are included: lowering it into position – as in this case, and pushing it on sideways.
I checked the measurement of the height of the frame of the gate which, of course, hadn’t moved, against height of the horizontal gate in the garage with its new fence board extensions lying ‘offered up’ to the cut-off bottoms of the originals.
They weren’t the same.
They weren’t the same!
My brain was suddenly in a whirl, bouncing from the gate frame to the lower cross-member to cut-off fence boards to newly created, now homogenous, lower fence boards and the nasty, yellow, builders’ tape-measure.
Gradually the ‘whirling’ slowed. My mistake became clear. I’d calculated the required length of the now homogenous, lower fence boards as being the same as the height of the width of the old, rotten lower cross member.
‘Oh bother!’ I said quietly.
I would have accepted that there would be a three-inch gap between the bottom of the gate and the surface of the stone pathway, BUT, when repair of the gate had first been mentioned in public, the nurse had reminded me of her specific requirement that the gap at the bottom of the gate has to be too small for rats to be able to get in.
So, day three was occupied by the cutting up of more Danish oak planks. I’m glad to say that the new pieces finished up even more accurately cut than their too-short predecessors. I put them together, drilled, and screwed them to the lower cross member and then screwed the newly homogenised, lower cross-member to the gate.
Nearly done. Except for the remaining holes in the woodwork and putting on another cross member, on the outside of the gate – a recently designed modification which makes the repair stronger (and the gate heavier).
The holes were a blessing in disguise: The nurse, in her painter and decorator role, found a tube of filler from which she squeezed a sticky paste, some of which went into the holes in the woodwork. It’s messy stuff and it hadn’t ‘gone off’ by morning so we had a holiday. Ditto for the next day.
I’ve now lost track of the number of days I/we have spent on the refurbishment of our garden gate.
On the first day back, after our little holiday, we sanded the front and the edges and the back, ready for the paint.
We’d chosen Terra Cotta.
Ida opened the tin.
“it’s red!” she said, instantly, disapprovingly.
“It’s too late” I said quickly’ followed by “It’ll be OK when it’s dry. Anyway, I like red.”
Still doubting, she poured some of the paint into her roller tray. She’s almost a professional painter and decorator, she has two different sizes of roller tray and goodness knows how many rollers!
I was given the task of reaching, with a brush – dipped into the paint in the tray, in case you thought that I hadn’t been considered responsible enough to do any real painting – and applying paint in all the nooks and crannies.
Meanwhile, Ida was applying splashes of ‘imitation blood’ to the garage floor by walking around with the paint tray at an angle differing somewhat from the horizontal.
I was helpful and sympathetic. Of course. I fetched a bucket of water.
The floor was clean and dry within a short time and we applied a second coat of paint to the gate.
Having successfully demonstrated my skill and steadiness of hand, I was allowed to paint the gate frame. Two coats… Two splodges on the brickwork and a couple of Cyclamen leaves suddenly changed from green to red were my only deviations from the perfect finish.
I would all be dry by the morning.
And it was.
We turned the gate onto its front and painted the back.
Sunday morning, yesterday as I write, eight days after the beginning of the great gate-renovation, we carried it out of the garage and stood it against the gate frame.
The paint had dried to an attractive and approved, Terra Cotta colour.
But the gate wouldn’t shut! How could that be? I’d screwed it back onto its hinges – which hadn’t been moved – even used the same screws! But ponder the problem as I might, the gate wouldn’t shut.
I had, only a few days previously, discarded my old, Surform rasp, the broken handle made it so uncomfortable to use. So I set to with 60 grit sandpaper.
Just at that moment our neighbour strolled by, “I have that problem every winter,” he said, “I must have made my gate smaller by half an inch over the years.”
How encouraging!
Two hours later the gate sort of fitted. By now it was dark. I went indoors and fired up the PC, Toolstation sold rasps, I ordered one, ‘click and collect’.
First thing in the morning I collected. I sliced off the last micro-millimetres of gate. It was almost perfect. A few more strokes and… the blade broke! A quick check online and they’re out of stock! Everywhere!!!
I reverted to sandpaper and, half-an-hour later, to my great relief the gate fitted in its frame!
I can expect dinner tonight.
Should you need, in the future, advice on garden gate maintenance, I know a jobbing handyman, his rates are quite fair.
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