New fence and gates at last

I have in the past written about undertaking emergency repairs to the wooden gates to our Gite, making new gate panels and 'spare parts', much more extensive repairs and rebuilding of the gates, and once again another episode of repairing the gates .

Actually if truth be told and I had been anything like accurate in writing my blog renovation postings, I'd have had an even more regular stream of posts over the years as each year I visited the Gite there was always some gate panels that had rotted apart, new panels to paint, or panels to be replaced and screwed back into position.

One time I found that one of the wooden supporting posts had almost rotted through at ground level so I had to dig it out, put a Metz post holder in the ground, and then re-hang the gate on the existing post that was fortunately long enough.

But like the Forth Bridge it seemed to be a never-ending maintenance project and I was beginning to suspect that I was replacing parts I had previously replaced a few years earlier!

In February when we were over I noticed that the fence itself was looking decidedly wobbly along the side of the Gite and some of the supporting fence posts were also starting to fail and the photos I took of the Gite unfortunately show the wobbly fence problem all too well.

So it was time to do something about it and frankly I was getting bored with repairing and repainting the gates each time. We asked Geoff if he could provide a quote to replace the fencing along the main road sides of the Gite with something more durable so we agreed a price for 1m high dark green plastic coated metal grillage, supported by concreted metal posts, and in total it needed a 50m length of new fencing to run from the pool past the patio, house, driveway and up to the boundary with the neighbours fence.

Having decided on replacing the fence we then decided to go whole-hog and replace the gates as well so my days of continual repainting would be at an end. There's two entranceways to the Gite so we needed two sets of gates and after researching different options we settled on white Aluminium gates from Leroy Merlin. We chose these because of the 10 year guarantee and that unlike many of the other options such as Wood or Steel they wouldn't need regular repainting or maintenance.

The fence replacement went well for Geoff but getting hold of the gates themselves turned out to be a major episode in its own right. I paid for and Geoff and Shirley ordered the Gates in March but when they went back to collect the gates a few weeks later the Leroy Merlin branch in St Brieuc denied all knowledge of the order and they had to travel to Vannes and start the whole ordering process all over again! Vannes were slightly more helpful but it still took weekly calls to find out what had happened to the order, and another abortive trip for Geoff and Shirley before finally earlier this month the gates arrived in - nearly 5 months after they'd first been ordered and paid for.

We are really delighted with the photos that Geoff sent us of the end result, the gates and fence all look really smart now and we're really looking forward to seeing them ourselves when we arrive at the Gite ourselves next week.