Back to the gates

Having at last managed to remove the hinges from the old gates, I carefully measured where they should be attached to the new, five-bar gates. "Measure twice, cut once," I told myself, although in this case it would be drill once. I had even thought to buy new nuts and bolts to avoid having to re-use the old, rusty ones. I offered up the right-hand gate. Perfect! I offered up the left-hand gate. Oh, oh, a snag. I had fixed the lower hinge an inch too high and it was taking no weight on the bracket fixed to the gatepost. So much for measuring twice. The gate was too heavy for the top hinge to take all the weight, so something had to be done. I was reluctant to drill more holes - in fact, there would have been no point as I had already fixed the hinge about as low as it would go. So it was back to Mr Bricolage, where the staff had almost come to accept me as a permanent resident. I spent half an hour searching the shelves and found nothing that would help, but a nearby agricultural merchant had just the thing - a metal cylinder about an inch long with a screw thread at one end – not that I needed the screw thread. It was probably a part for a tractor, although goodness knows what part.

It had taken me a day and a half to hang those gates, a job which I had expected to take me no more than a couple of hours. There was no time on this trip to complete the next major job, which was constructing a pergola to provide a shady nook for meals alfresco, so I pottered around for a couple of days. One thing I did was measure the rooms (with extreme care) so that I could buy the wallpaper, although hanging it would have to wait until Emmanuel had finished the rewiring.