Open the Gate

Our gate story starts with a driveway update:

As many of you know establishing our driveway has been a long and tortuous road.   We’ve experience the excitement of actually getting a contractor out to talk to us (ok, two contractors out of TWELVE. Oops, did I shout?) and the upset when the same contractors seemed to pack their saddlebags and beat it out of town like a villain from a bad spaghetti western. Of course there was the one written quote that left us gasping for air. So all in all its been a frustrating bust.

According to Wikipedia: A driveway is a type of private road for local access to one or a small group of structures, and is owned and maintained by an individual or group.

Maybe for some Wikipedia… not for all.

Mr. Bluejeans and I were putting pencil to paper, trying to figure out how to do this massive project ourselves. A third of a mile driveway is NOT for the newbie bulldozer driver (aka: me) but I’ve always been one to roll up my sleeves and learn, so this project is no different. We even bought a very large and BORING book about highway construction trying to put the pieces together of how to begin building a road. I found this book to be a great sleep aid. Didn’t understand a thing but man oh man I was out like a light after reading a page or two.

Then a name fell into our laps. Fingers crossed as this fellow showed up last Saturday AND seemed interested.  He and his partner stayed and shared their knowledge and insights with us. No surprise to learn that  Mr. Bluejeans and I would’ve made a mess of it if we had moved forward in the direction we planned. Which would’ve been the direction of failure.

For the moment we wait… holding our breath for an affordable quote and not the sounds of horse hooves beating a path out of town!  I don’t wait well and there are plenty of projects ahead of us so we decided it was time to open up our barbed wire fencing that runs the length of the country road.  Our land doesn’t have an entrance. At. All.  Via our neighbors kindness, we’ve been using an easement across his property to gain entry to ours.

The area we chose to open up won’t be the entry for the driveway but it is level and the best place, for now, to pull in and park. Off we went to shop for gates. At first I was taken in by the shiny tubular gates at the supply store. I love those gates but this is a temporary entrance and spending $110 on a temporary gate was not in the cards. Especially since I haven’t won Power Ball… yet.

We had some bits and pieces in storage and ended up spending just $22 to pull it all together. Here’s what we did:

We used two 2 x 4 x 8’s and cut each to roughly 5′ tall.

Using a 16′ cattle panel and some large fence staples we stapled the cattle panel to the cut 2 x 4’s.

Mr. Bluejeans drilled a single hole at the top of one of the 2×4’s so we could make a jenky gate latch using fence wire we had. He drilled several large holes in the other 2×4 and using the same fence wire, he threaded it through and wrapped the wire ends around the T-post that was already in the ground, making the wire into a makeshift hinge.

It works perfect for our needs. There’s No Doubt we can Open The Gate (I know someone will get this). Seriously, we really like the versatility of cattle and hog panels and guarantee you’ll see them used on the farm in many ways… as soon as we can get on the farm anyway!

Here’s a quick “live” view of our quick and inexpensive project:

Have you used recycled items on a project?