Job No.1 Contain the Dogs

As previously seen in blogs, "The beginning of the Befores" and "Why this House?", my husband and I have 2 dogs in our lives. Finn, the rather large German Shepherd/ Husky and Bella, the not so large, but still by no means small Australian Kelpie. Both have great times taking over our lives and making pretty much everything we do all about them.

As far as house renovation goes theres a general need to be continuously walking in and out of a house, so the first job, had to be completely unrelated to actually renovating the house and all about the dogs - putting a gate on the garden.

As jobs go, we thought this would be pretty straight forward, but still it managed to take longer than planned. After some research we discovered it would be a minimum of £200 to buy a decent 5 bar gate, then we still needed the required posts, hinges, latches etc. A quick call to some local gate/fencing companies and we found it would be around £400 to buy a gate and have it installed. However due to the slope going up at the entrance to our drive, the gate would either have to be hung about 18 inches off the ground (not so practical for keeping dogs in) or we would have to dig up the concrete drive way. The latter we are planning to do eventually anyway, but for the duration of building works it makes more sense to keep the very dilapidated concrete in place.

So we elected for the cheap quick fix. Buy the cheapest gate we could find and only expect it to last until we dig up the driveway. Apparently the cheapest option is Wickes wooden flat pack gates (about £25 each) we needed 2 because they were only just over a metre wide. This also solved our issue of how high to hang them, because of the shorted length they didn't need to open as far into the drive.

Mat sporting his dashing double denim work look to model with the new gate, while Finn looks on. He was very pleased to later find his head fits perfectly through the holes to check on passers by.

Fortunately our dogs are great at realising a barrier there to make a point, even if it doesn't actually stop them. Which is handy because Finn previously demonstrated his ability to jump 5 foot without hesitation. As by the time we were done the result wasn't particularly pretty or dog proof. But it was cheap, and by the time we've grown some additional hedge around the edges it will do for now.