How To Look After Your Garden Gates ♥

Making any type of upgrade to your garden is a sizeable investment, and it’s important that once everything is in place, you know how to properly look after it. By far, wooden fencing and gates are the most popular nationwide, however, they require the most care, too. If you fail to take proper care of your wooden gates then, over time, they will become damaged, brittle, and split.

Make sure you look after them properly with our top tips!

#1: Invest in Quality Gates

This is the first step to ensuring you end up with beautiful wooden gates which will last a long time. Investing in a good quality wooden gate is, after all, an investment in your property and can help increase its value, as well as making it look great. Buy cheap, buy twice is how the saying goes, and it is certainly something which applies to garden gates just as much as it does to quality kitchenware and the like.  If you are on the market for some new garden gates or side gates, then why not check out these garden gates at Buy Fencing Direct? Their products are extremely durable and have an anti-rot warranty, so you’re covered if an issue arises.

With a little regular maintenance, your new wooden garden gates will be kept in fantastic condition throughout the coldest winters and hottest of summers without them showing signs of ageing. If only looking after ourselves was this easy!

#2: Tips for Looking After Wooden Gates

If you buy your gates from a supplier who produces a quality product and has a good reputation, you will find that they are made from good materials such as pressure-treated timber, and this means that you won’t need to stain or treat them to prevent problems such as rot and fraying. Whilst you don’t have to treat them, it’s always a good idea to do so annually to prevent weathering and keep the colour looking the best it can. However, the sun and rain will still have an impact on even the best wooden gates over time, so occasional maintenance is something which you will need to do. To maintain your gates, you can either stain them or treat them with a preservative paint.

Given that it is wood, though, it will shrink and swell over time as changes in temperature and moisture take place. Because of this, cracks can start to appear in the wood’s grain. This is not a problem at all and even makes your gate look more characterful. The likelihood of this occurring really does depend on the type of wood used and how it has been treated (i.e. pressure-treated timber is less likely to crack) and you can prevent these cracks from turning into problems by occasionally wiping down the gates with a damp cloth to remove any dirt and prevent it getting into the cracks.

#3: Perform a Yearly Inspection

This is what I mean when I say that wooden gates don’t require that much looking after so long as they are a of a good quality. In most cases, you only need to give them a quick yearly inspection to figure out whether there are any problems or potential problems which require your attention.

To prolong the lifespan of your gates, check their overall condition and consider the following –

• Is it catching on the ground at all?
• Are the hinges and latches well secured and not coming loose?
• How do the gate’s posts look? Are they firmly in place, or wobbly?
• Is the paint/stain suitable, or does it need topping up?

This is all you really need to look at, and the fixes for these problems are usually simple DIY jobs which you can find several guides for online. Even if your gate’s paintjob looks fine, it is always worth topping it up, especially if you are using a protective paint or have stained them. You can’t ever have too much of a good thing, and this goes for your gates – adding an extra layer on, especially if it’s been more than a year, isn’t going to harm the gates and it just may do them some good and fix some problems you couldn’t see.

Your garden is just as important to the value of your home as the house and the interior itself. Investing good money into your garden by installing quality fixtures and fittings can add thousands onto the overall value of your home, as well as making it look great.

One place where people sometimes cheap out is with their fencing and gates. If you buy cheap gates and fencing, then you are more likely to run into problems with them and they will naturally require more maintenance. By purchasing high-quality wooden gates and fencing, they will last a very long time and will require minimum maintenance.