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Fence Gates

2006.06.30

Nate has continued to work on his fence, and had almost everything done except for the gates.  I went over after work today to help out again.

Poor Nate has hurt his wrist doing all this fence work, and woke up the other night with sharp pain running up his arm.  He went to a chiropractor for some treatment.  Now we’re both wearing wrist braces.

We started with the people gate, which Nate had decided to make about five feet wide, rather than sink yet another post and do a more normal-size one.  Looks a little funny I think, but, it’s not my fence.  He had purchased some metal corner brackets from Home Depot, which screw together with 2x4’s to form a pretty solid frame.  After that frame was finished, we moved on to the driveway gates.  Despite being a couple amateurs out there, we actually got the two driveway gates to line up pretty close.

2006.07.01

Today we continued working on Nate’s fence gates.  At first, we were planning to rip the fence boards in half and space them out.  So we wasted some time in the cool morning hours talking that over, running to Lowes, and second-guessing ourselves.  Then one of Nate’s next-door neighbors came over and convinced us to just use the full boards like the rest of the fence (except no 2x4 top rail and other details).  So once we actually got started, it moved along pretty well, until we had to make a run to Home Depot for more fence boards.  It was in the 80’s today, so that slowed us down some.

We got all the fence boards on the three gates, and the latching mechanism on the people gate.  Nate still has to do the latch on the driveway gates, and a one-board filler on the far side of the driveway (so Kodi can’t stick her head through there).

After we had finished, Nate hastily threw together a mock For Sale sign, to get a rise out of his neighbors.  $196,500 is well under the median home price in Portland, but more than he could probably sell it for in that neighborhood.  Yuki came out to see what we were doing and was entirely amused.  Kodi on the other hand, was not.