017 shows the driveway and where the gate will be located. The gate will be located about fifty feet inside the property and slide open to the left in the photo. The opening is just over twenty feet, driveway width, 22 feet actually. The gate hasn't been made yet but will be fourteen to sixteen wide and be motorized. The gate will be a woven basket, with handle even.
I wanted to do something at the entryway that directed your eyes down the drive to the gate. The other photos show the radius' for the plant areas. There is one on each side of the drive. The rest of the fence is ranch fence five rail basket weave pattern. Five inch rail, five inch space, five inch rail, five inch space, five inch rail, five inch space. five inch rail, five inch space, five inch rail, and then space to grade. But the two arcs at the entry way are higher than the front fence line and have a solid pattern, basket weave. I believe this will accent the plants and vice versa. I also believe it will frame the gate.
I was facing two options when it came to grade change, lots of it here on the property. All the rails could be level which would mean lots of stair stepping in ten inch increments, not enough grade change for that for the most part. Or I could run the lines straight and not level. I chose straight. The brackets I had made for attaching the rails to the posts are over sized enough for me to have an inch per foot of spacing drop or rise. I don't have that anywhere on the job.
I pointed out earlier that the keystone post was the one at the base of the tree, the first post set because its location dictated all the rest of the posts spacing. I'm going to have to make some more posts and we want to have some extras for the homeowner in case an auto accident takes out a post.
Friday one of my older friends saw the truck and stopped to see what I was doing. He grabbed a post to shake it and exclaimed, "my gawd, these posts solid teak?" Between the thickness of the steel and the depth and width of the concrete footers they do feel like they are a solid post.
The west side of the property's posts are set, 54 each. Monday we start setting the east side, 31 posts.
The powder coater has most of the rails powder coated and ready for the texture finish process. It's going to take awhile for them for this part of the job. Most of their work using this process involves stainless, aluminum, and occasionally thin steel materials. It takes less time in the oven to get the material to the right temperature and they can handle it sooner because it cools down faster when it comes out of the oven than our project. Ours is thick steel and it is big, five inches wide, three sixteenths inch thick, and twenty feet long. Our project is going to take them at least fifty percent more time to handle than their normal projects do.
This is too much fun for a man my age to have, right?
