Driveway Gate/Fence

Now that the nice weather is here, we are spending alot more time outside. The only problem is that I am so nervous about our driveway which is open to the backyard. My daughter wants to explore the driveway and I don't want her to. Combination of cars, plus its a shared driveway and on a busy street.

So a few weeks ago we built a gate/fence thing. For most of the time it will act as a fence, but when we want a full driveway the fence part also opens as a larger gate and then you can use the full driveway as usual. (we haven't actually tried opening the larger 'gate' and are unsure if it will actually open since the driveway isn't flat.....but we will figure that out when we need to)

One side (the gate) is attached to our house, and the other fence (larger gate) side is anchored by a massive planter. The planter itself is pretty heavy, plus we filled the bottom with rocks and the top has a planter in it - it is very heavy. We didn't want to attach it to our neighbours garage so this was what I came up with as an alternative. So far its just filled with sticks and fake spring blooms. Soon I will buy some hanging baskets to put in my planters, I find thats the cheapest/easiest thing for all my planters.

The fence is designed to match our deck railing, hopefully tying the two wooden structures together. Although the new fence is cedar and the old deck is pressure treated, it didn't really matter what we built the fence out of since it would look newer/better than the deck. I also chose to build a low and open fence instead of a tall and solid one since I didn't want to create privacy as much as safety. We enter our house through the back door and I didn't want guests to feel uncertain about coming through the gate.

Now we can be outside worry free, and my daughter has much more freedom to explore.

Plus it feels like our backyard has almost doubled in size, I never realized how much the driveway ate up our property - and we rarely have 5 cars in the driveway.

- Lauren