Torii Gate

Here's a few pictures of a Torii Gate I built to define and highlight the creek bed from the street. As you remember, the original vista looked like this:

That's not really that attractive. So I cleared the woody shooty things (which are some sort of impossible to kill willow our neighbor tells us...) and we had this:

An improvement to be sure. A couple of weeks ago, I bought a few more split fence posts (which they now sell at Lowes...) and put in a short length of fence across the front of the creek here, three posts, two sets of rails.

It was OK, but not great. It cut off the view more than I wanted, and because of the steepness of the slope I either had to put it up at street level and six feet past our property line, or weirdly low and near our property line.

Then in the end I ended up putting it right where a drain pipe that runs under our driveway empties, which is not the most brilliant thing I've ever done.

So I took the fence down, designed the gate, built a quick mock up to hold up in the space and discovered it was WAY too big. So I scaled it down and built this:

Scaled down was very nice, too, because I cut the lumber costs way down. Total cost with lumber, hardware, concrete and stain (which I'll apply once the wood dries out some) was $125. Not too bad.

Diane is planting hand-me-down vinca a neighbor took out, and even out there right now even though it's full dark!