Gate Repair in Palo Alto

It sags and catches the ground. Almost always the hinge post. A gate hangs off one side of one post and levers it toward the opening every time somebody walks through; once that post tilts, the far corner drops and the bottom rail starts sweeping the dirt. The tell is that the gate itself is still square — hold a level against the leaf and it reads true while the gap at the top runs wedge-shaped.

It closes in winter and binds in summer, or the other way round. That is the post and the ground it stands in, moving with the season. Wood takes up water and swells, soil heaves and settles, and a gate set with no clearance at all in February is a gate that will not shut in August. An adjustable latch absorbs the drift; a gate planed to fit one season does not.

The latch misses but the gate looks fine. Usually the frame rather than the post: a leaf with no working diagonal slowly goes from rectangle to parallelogram, and the keeper ends up a finger's width above or below the bar. The brace is the fix, not the keeper — moving the keeper chases the sag down the post for another year.

The hinges have pulled out. Two causes, and they are worth telling apart. Screws driven into end grain — into the cut end of a rail rather than the face of the stile — have very little to hold, and they let go under a gate's weight. Or the hinge is simply undersized for the leaf: a heavy solid gate on light strap hinges works them oval until the pin sits loose.

One visit: hinges upsized and re-fixed into sound material, a repair block let in where the original wood is chewed, a diagonal or a turnbuckle fitted and the leaf pulled back to square, a latch swapped for one with adjustment in it, a drop rod set. These are the jobs where the gate you own goes back on the posts you own.

Not one visit: a hinge post that has failed at ground level. That is a post replacement with a gate attached to it, and the honest version is to say so before starting rather than to keep re-hanging a gate on a post that is going.

The good news is what that usually means. The leaf is generally the sound part — the boards and the frame are above ground and out of the wet, while the post is the member sitting in soil that gets watered. So the ordinary result of a proper look is a new post carrying the gate you already have, which is exactly the split you can see in the photographs on this page: fresh timber at the base, everything above it original.

Three of the four failures above are repairs. The fourth — a hinge post gone at ground level — is the one that sometimes brings a new gate with it, and what decides that is the age of the leaf relative to the post. A sound leaf goes back onto the new post and nothing else changes. A leaf the same age as the post it has been levering on for twenty years usually has open joints and a soft bottom rail, and refitting that to fresh timber buys a season rather than a decade.

In Palo Alto the swap is cheap in the one way that matters. A gate replaced in the same opening, at the same height and in the same material, leaves height, material and position where they were — so the rules stay out of it. It is cutting a new opening at the front, or coming back taller, that changes the conversation.

What doesn't come with it is the fence. A new gate hangs in a line that already stands; building that line isn't work this business takes on.

Repairing or re-hanging a gate in place leaves the three things Palo Alto's rules are actually about — height, material and position — where they were, so it is not a permit conversation. It becomes one if the gate comes back taller or in a different material, or if a new opening is cut at the front, where an entry gate has its own allowance on conditions. Those figures, with the code sections they come from, are on fence rules and permits.

Three photographs settle most of it: the gate closed, showing the gap down the latch side; the hinge side from top to bottom; and the base of the hinge post where it enters the ground. If the post moves when you push the gate, a few seconds of video is worth more than another still. Send them through the form and you will get back which of the four it is, and whether it is a visit or a post.