A 100th Celebration

No, I'm not that old although I do sometimes feel it.

The celebration is because the Blogger editor tells me that this my 100th post since I started this blog twenty seven months ago. Having a back-up on Word, the word count tells me that it now comprises almost 62,000 words, which is probably a whole book, I suppose.  The blog has been quite useful for myself when I have forgotten how, when or why I did some particular thing, and it has also encouraged me to take a couple of thousand pictures of the work as it progressed.  Mind you, there are still some things of which I have managed to fail to take pictures; this surprises me as I seem to have the camera close to hand most days.

Some unexpected good weather this week has allowed me to lay some more concrete near the back gate and to start finishing the low wall in the front which leads up to the new wall.  I'm still putting off the inside jobs until the weather is too bad to work outdoors at all.

Finishing the concrete at the back gate was a relief; I had already purchased a monkey tail bolt (right) - the sort with a long handle to operate it, as these are often used at the top and bottom of large doors and gates.  Since I wanted the half-inch square bolt to locate in the concrete, I had to leave that bit of concreting until after I had fitted the gate and the bolt, so that I could set the bolt in its receptacle in the ground and concrete around the receptacle (a bit of square tube, just visible in the photo); even so, the bolt needed modifying as I wanted a greater travel than any bolt I found, since I wasn't sure about how close to the ground I would get the bottom of my gate.  This modification was easy once I had found some rivets to allow me to drill out the existing and move the retaining bracket up a bit.  In the event, the gate is satisfyingly low (ref cats, comment below) and I could have moved the bracket a bit less.

I treated myself in a shop recently and bought a blacksmith-made Suffolk latch (photo left) for these gates.  You know, the sort of one where you operate a lever on one side with your thumb above the handle, and it lifts the latch inside.  I have to say, at £35 it was quite expensive compared to mass-produced stuff from W and HB, but they cannot even get close to the quality and feel of something properly made like this.  (Yes, I need to restore the paint finish...)

The gates need to be secure so there are two other horizontal bolts plus a support strut which goes to the new gate pillar; of course, when secured the Suffolk latch will not open the gates from outside, but other than some ugly padlock I could not see how I could secure and open the gates from both sides.  In fact, what I really wanted to secure the gates with was one of those bits of 4 by 2 which fits into brackets on either side - like an old fortress gate.  I would have wanted to use oak (which is obtainable) but I couldn't find any nice sturdy brackets anywhere; brackets made out of wood would be a bit too chunky for the size of these gates.  Anyway, the gates are now pretty secure and, to my delight, they keep the local cats out; one of these is a huge, insolent black moggy and another is pure white.  They seem to have used the garden as their own pathway from front to back for years, stopping for a bird meal somewhere if they got lucky.

I also want to put a strip of wood down the front edge of the right hand gate as a stop for the left hand one; I found a long strip of half inch seasoned old pine removed from somewhere, but I can't recall exactly where.  As I've said before, keeping something which "looks useful" for a year or eighteen months on the off-chance, and then finding a use for it is very satisfying as well as economic (I once used a car light bulb which I had bought 17 years previously for an earlier car!)  Strip, sand, cut to length, fill, sand, prime, undercoat, top coat and then I can fit it.  Then there's just a drip strip along the top of both gates and a quick touch up of the paint, and they will be done.

There's then just the small job of painting the left hand gate black.  This is not so easy as the paint is some incredibly hard modern stuff on which all known sandpaper seems to have no discernible effect.  I did the road side a long time ago using my sander plus a good number of sheets of aluminium oxide paper, so I guess it will be the same again, but largely by hand this time thanks to the ledges and braces.  You can see why I am leaving that task for later!