DIY Large Fence Gates How to Build a Gate that Won t Sag 13’ Double Gate Fence Makeover Pt. 2

Welcome back to my fencing project. This is part two. In part one, I built 150 feet of new shadow box fencing. Today in part two, we're building gates. I have two gates to build. One 13-foot double gate here that might be a little bit difficult because it's going to be a bit heavy, and then one 4-foot gate that's going to go in the back that'll be a little bit more traditional. I hope you guys stick around and see what I come up with. To start the project off, we're going to measure twice and hopefully build the gate once. As you can see, once I had my measurements, I started making some plans. There's a bunch of different variations, slightly different. I think any of these would have worked, but the major thing that I was looking for was a compression brace. I was looking for a diagonal brace that is going to be under compression and transferring weight back into the 2x4 that's connected to the hinges. Once I had my plans, I just started cutting pressure-treated 2x4 lumber to make the frame for the small gate. I figured start off with the small one, and then we'll work up to the bigger one. When cutting down the 2x4s for the frame, I left them long enough so that they would overlap each other. I did this on purpose because the type of joint that we're going to be using, and one that's going to actually create a lot of the strength, is called a lap joint, where they overlap each other. What I need to do first is mark off where these boards are overlapping each other, and then I'm going to cut away half of each board so that they fit together flush. There's many ways to make a lap joint. To do this, I took mine over the table saw. I first set the height of the blade to 3 quarters of an inch, half of a 1.5 inch 2x4. Then I set the width of what the other 2x4 was, roughly 3.5 inches, and I made sure I measured and checked it on the table saw, not just trust the measurement. Then I went ahead and started running this back and forth through the table saw blade. If I had a dado set, it would have made this a lot easier and faster, but I used what I had. Then the parts of the board that are left are pretty easy to break out by hand. You can do this by hand, or you can use a chisel or maybe even a screwdriver to help pry these out. After all of them were gone, I took a chisel and ran over it, just to clean it up, just so they looked really nice and they fit together pretty well. The next step is actually to check the fitment of all the joints. You just lay the boards over top to check to make sure all the lap joints fit together tight, they should be square, and the boards should be flush on top and bottom. The last step that I did to make sure that my fence gate was square was I took a tape measure and measured diagonal from corner to corner across both directions, and that number in theory should be identical. Once I knew the lap joints fit together well, I started gluing these together. I'm using Titebond 3 wood glue because I've had really good luck with it so far, and it's rated for outdoor use. Then I just put the two pieces together, make sure that they're flush. I'm getting all kinds of glue all over my driveway, but that's okay. Then the next step, I actually took the fence gate hinge that I was going to use and marked out the holes, where those holes were going to be. That way I knew where I could put screws in that weren't going to intersect with the lag bolts that I was going to use later. For this, I'm just using an inch and a quarter decking screw. Now it's time to put in the angle brace that I was talking about before. For this one, I just went from corner to corner. I think it was the easiest thing to do, and if you put the angle brace from corner to corner, in theory, you're going to even help strengthen those corner joints even more. To do this, I just laid the 2x4 underneath the gate. I had a mark so I could tell where the center of that angle brace 2x4 was, laid it in there so that that center mark lined up directly with the corner, and then used a pen to mark off the angle. After the angles were cut on the miter saw, I used my favorite Kreg jig pocket hole screws to attach this to the frame of the gate. I figured this was a whole lot stronger than screwing it in at an angle or trying to toenail it or something like that. Then the next thing that I did was added two horizontal pieces in the center of the gate. These really don't add any strength or structure, I mean they might a little bit, but really the big thing that these were for is so that I have something to attach the pickets to later. Alright, so building the smaller gate frame went pretty well, and it was fairly straightforward and pretty easy. Now it's time to work on this double gate, and normally what we would do is we would just build two more of those, and we would mount one on this post and one on that post down there, and they would butt up together and everything would be great. The only problem is with my fence, when I did this, my yard's on a slope, so that end of my fence is higher than this end over here. I have about two and a half to three degrees of slope going up there, and I'll be honest with you, I could do that, I could just put a square gate here and a square gate there and let them butt up. The only problem is if my calculation or my math is correct, at two and a half degrees or three degrees slope over 13 feet, we're looking at somewhere between six to eight inches in difference of height. So that's going to drive me nuts, and I don't want to do that. So I've kind of found a different way about doing this where I don't have to use math. I've put these three pink strings up here, and I'll show you how I'm going to use these to help me build my gates. Alright, so these pink strings really represent me not wanting to rely on a calculation. You could see that there was a wide range in my calculation, and I couldn't pinpoint down an exact degree, it was 2.5 to three or something like that. So what these pink strings are is they are marked off at the top of each stringer going across, and they are a visual representation of where those stringers are going to go on my fence gate. So using a little bit of help, I held the vertical components of the gate where they should be and marked them off with a straight edge. I just copied where the string line was onto the vertical pieces of the gate so I knew exactly where they were going to line up. And here they are sitting in a wheelbarrow afterwards, and you can see they're labeled 1, 2, 3, and 4, going from left to right, and I know exactly where those stringers are going to go so that I know exactly where to put my lap joints to connect these all together. There's no calculation, it's just a physical line. And then you can see that I also marked on the string where each vertical piece was going to go in case I needed to line it up later. So it was time to make lap joints again, and with 16 boards to cut for 8 joints, I had to think of something different. So this time we used the miter saw, and I've never seen anybody do it like this before. I don't know if we invented something new here, but it was awesome. Every time I pulled the saw forward, my dad would hit the board with a hammer, and it would knock it over about an eighth of an inch to a quarter of an inch, and it worked out amazing. It made this so much easier, so much faster, and the joints came out so smooth. With everything laid out in the driveway, I followed the same process as I did with the small gate. The only thing that you can't see and that is different for this one is that I marked out the gate opening on the driveway in sidewalk chalk. So I have an angled line at the bottom and an angled line at the top, and then two vertical lines on either side to make sure that those lap joints are following the correct angle and that they were aligned correctly. It just made me feel a little bit better about the process. Then the next step was to put in the angled piece, and you can see that I didn't go from corner to corner. I kept the angled piece at as close to a 45 degree angle as I could. My reasoning behind this is that keeping the angle close to 45 degrees, or steeper, makes it a little bit stronger. The more that it lays out, the weaker that brace would become. And then the last thing that I did was put in the two horizontal pieces, and that's just to support the pickets. For both gates where I use pocket hole screws to attach things together, I'm coming back with a little wood glue and these plugs to smooth these things out and make them flush. It also helps keep water out of them. Then I'll use a belt sander just to knock off any of the pieces around the joints to make everything flush and look good. Then with both sides of the double gate laid out in the driveway exactly as I would install them, lined up with the proper spacing, I'm using two pieces of scrap wood and a bunch of screws to screw both sides of the gate together. And the reason that I'm doing this is because I'm going to try to install these all as one unit. I think this way things are going to stay lined up and overall it'll be a little bit easier to install. Then the first step to actually installing the gate was to mark out the height of where the pickets were going to be. And I needed to do this because I actually had to install a picket first. The gate hinges overlap that first picket, so before I could put the hinges in, I had to have the first picket there. Then I went ahead and started attaching the three gate hinges to the side of the fence, pre-drilling the holes, and then putting in the lag screws. One thing that I like to do when putting in gate hinges is to make sure that they're all aligned vertically. They don't necessarily need to be level, although that's ideal, but I want to make sure that they're all in line so they're rotating on the same axis. Each hinge takes a total of eight lag screws. The ones that go into the 4x4 posts are four inches long, and then the ones that go into the 2x4s and the pickets can be somewhere between an inch and three quarters and two inches long. To install the pickets, I started off in the center, and I used the string line at the top to determine the height of them. And actually, I used one and a half inch decking screws to install these, rather than nails like I did with the rest of the fence. I felt like this would be a little bit stronger, and then also if I ever had to replace one would be a little bit easier. Once all the pickets on the outside were installed, this was kind of the moment of truth, and I started unscrewing the boards so that both of these would swing freely. I definitely wanted to make sure that one side of the pickets were installed first, because the pickets actually add a lot of strength to it, because they triangulate everything. But you can see, the boards are off, and it didn't move, it didn't sag at all. So with the fence looking pretty good, I started putting on the pickets on the inside. Alright, so at this point I found something that I kind of didn't plan for. You can see that I left the vertical pieces a little bit longer, and I really like this because it made the lap joints seem a little bit stronger. But I want to mount a set of wheels on the bottom here, so if I could do this again, I would have left these as long as the pickets, down another foot or so. But you can see that I just installed those two pieces of 2x4 there, then I cut down a picket in half, and I'm going to use that as a splint, and I think this will work just about as good. Now that I had those extensions on there, it was really easy to install a drop rod, or a cane bolt, as some people call them. And all this is, is just a rod that goes down into the ground that kind of locks the bottom or the center of the fence right in place, right where you want it. So I installed these on the fence, and then once I had everything installed, I got the fence lined up in a straight line exactly where I wanted it, and I pounded these two rods into the ground. Once I pounded the two rods into the ground, I pulled them back out, and they left holes or indents in the ground. After that, I took these two pieces of PVC that are about eight inches long each, and pounded those into the ground, right where those two holes are. And the rod actually fits into the PVC perfectly, and that's going to be kind of like the liner where the rod is going to be inserted into, into the ground, and hold it in place. Then right in front of those pieces of PVC, I'm using a flat-headed shovel just so I can dig out a small piece of grass and dirt to put in a paver flush with ground level. I'm doing this so that the wheels that I'm going to install here in a second have something solid to rest on. And the last thing that I did to finalize the fence was to put in a latch at the top, right in line with the top stringer to help hold the top of the gate kind of together so that the two pieces couldn't sway apart from each other. Then in the middle, I added a latch that can be opened from the inside or the out. And then at the bottom, you can see that I installed the two wheels with some lag screws. These wheels are really nice because they're always taking weight from the center of the fence on either panel. You can see that they're spring-loaded, so they're always under compression. On the packaging, they said they're rated for 200 pounds, but I don't exactly know what the actual strength of that spring is. I don't know what force. It's actually applying to the bottom of the fence, but anything has to be better than nothing. So at all times, there is something pushing back up on that fence, and I think it's going to work out pretty good. The fence opens and closes great. Those caster wheels swivel, and it slides open and closed, and it works pretty well. And I think it looks pretty decent as well, too. Alright, as far as the small gate's concerned, it went up just the same way as the big one, only a whole lot easier. Really the main thing that I can show you is the latch. So you can see that I am installing the latch here, and it's the same latch that I used on the larger gate. And you can see that it opens really nicely from the outside, as well as from the inside. And there's a place that I can put a lock on the inside. The big thing that you'll notice with this one is that the boards are pre-stained. And really, the reason for that is I've been moving old fence panels from my yard, moving them out to the outside of my yard, so that I can fully maximize my property. And that's the entire reason that I'm doing this whole project, is because I'm moving my fence out. So if you want to see me move those old fence panels, that'll be coming in a future video. But that's why these boards are stained, and the other ones weren't. Alright, it's about a month later now since I actually built this gate. And looking at it, you can see that something's changed. I'm actually in the process of staining the entire fence right now. And I have the first coat on here, so I'm not 100% done yet. But as far as the gate's concerned, besides the stain, it's done, and it has been done. And it really hasn't changed. About a month ago, I took a measurement from the bottom of the gate to the ground, and I just double-checked that, and they're almost identically the same. There really hasn't been any sag or any movement on this gate, and I'm pretty pleased with it, I'll be honest with you. I think the reason that we haven't seen any movement is because the gate is kind of resting on those wheels, and then the other thing is we have that really strong cross brace, that compression brace, that's really anchoring things together. So overall, I'm pretty happy. It wasn't the craziest project in the world, but sometimes you gotta build a really large gate like this, and I think this worked out well. The other gate that I have on the other side of the yard is working perfectly fine, but there's nothing really special with that one. This was the one, if something went wrong, it was gonna happen on this one. And with every project, I think there's always ways that you can improve, and if I would do this differently, the diagonal brace, the compression brace that comes through, I think I would have lap-jointed those two as well. I think I was just getting really tired of making lap-joints. But overall, it's holding strong, it looks pretty good still, 99% of the time it stays closed, but when I do open it, it works exactly the way it should. So, if you enjoyed the video, please hit like, it helps the channel. If you enjoyed these projects, you wanna see how the staining of my fence comes out, or any of the other projects that I'm doing around here, I encourage you to subscribe, and hopefully I see you guys in another video.