Today my other half Rich put the garden gate up. Or should I say hung the garden gate? Either way, we’re very proud of our garden gate. It might seem trivial to some, but Rich managed to build the gate entirely by himself, without any power tools. There was a lot of grumbling and the occasional bout of swearing, and owing to our distinct lack of useful power tools, it took a while to construct - but he managed it.

The gate is there to stop the hens from escaping from the top of the garden, making their way up the drive and onto the road, and from there - who knows! Before we had hen-proofed properly we did find them in the neighbour’s front garden flower bed, starting to dig a hole for some dust bathing. Luckily our hens are obsessed with any sort of running water, and a quick perfunctory splosh on the floor of Rich’s cup of tea managed to do the trick, and soon we had them herded back into our back garden.

But back to the beloved gate. The gap that had to be gated off was a tricky size, and all the pre-made (and somewhat twee) gates we came across were either too small or too vast. Not to mention ridiculously expensive. So the only solution was to create our own bespoke five-bar wooden gate to suit. Having put it all together on the kitchen floor, and avoiding the cat bowls and my attempts to cook dinner around him, Rich finally managed to get the structure into an upright position, ready for painting. On further inspection we decided it looked far too new - in contrast we fondly refer to our semi-detached cottage as rustic or tumbledown - and as such we felt the gate should match. So I took to it with a hammer and bolster chisel, thumping random impressions into it and rounding off the edges. It might sound like an odd thing to do, but I remember seeing a programme about a cockney crafstmen who used to construct everything from salvage, and this is a technique he used in ageing his rustic kitchen table.

Anyhow, it’s up there now, and once it’s weathered down from it’s new(ish) slightly orangey-just-been-painted-with-wood-preserver state, I think it’ll do very nicely indeed. There’s something extremely satisfying about being able to construct home-crafted pieces. Although Rich might just wish that he hadn’t proved how handy he is with a hammer and saw, as I have a few more projects for him up my sleeve now!

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 2nd, 2007 at 6:37 pm and is filed under craft, garden, hens. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.