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Our New Bikeport, An Open Air Bike Shed


Once the winter rains in California subsided, our family wanted to ride our bikes more.  Our current bike storage location is in the garage, but was inconvenient to get multiple bikes in and out of on a regular basis.  Our large driveway/walkway on the side of our house seemed like a great location to store our bikes.  However, we wanted to protect the bikes, both from the rain and the gaze of bike thieves.

Chris thought of a lightweight structure that had a roof sort of a carport for bikes, i.e. a bikeport.    It’s not a full-blown bike shed because it’s not fully enclosed but it serves the same purpose. Here’s a view of the finished product.  Total cost ~$142

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Finished DIY Redwood Craftsman Fence Gate

After the gate was built, the next steps are to hang it, install hardware and then stain/seal it.   Here is the finished gate after all of these steps.  We are very excited with how it turned out!  Please check out the previous post to see how the gate was made.

Redwood Craftsman gate

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DIY Designing and Building A Redwood Craftsman Gate (for under $200)

After our fence and driveway project (which was completed 4 years ago), we had planned to build a nice gate.  In that previous post, the following line appears:

Chris has plans to build a nice gate, but that project probably won’t get done for a little while.

So here we are “a little while” later and after some gentle nudging from Shirley, I (Chris) am finally going to make the gate.  I had been planning for the gate for quite awhile, including figuring out the design and buying tools, so when it came time to actually build the gate, it didn’t take too much time at all.  Overall, it took about 1 week or so (maybe ~20 hours of actual work) to build the gate.

Here are the finished two gates that will span the narrow driveway, sitting on our back deck.

building redwood craftsman gate

Continue reading “DIY Designing and Building A Redwood Craftsman Gate (for under $200)”

rp_img_9805.jpg

Designing and Building A Redwood Craftsman Fence Gate (for under $200)

After our fence and driveway project (which was completed 4 years ago), we had planned to build a nice fence gate.  In that previous post, the following line appears:

Chris has plans to build a nice gate, but that project probably won’t get done for a little while.

So here we are “a little while” later and after some gentle nudging from Shirley, I (Chris) am finally going to make the gate.  I had been planning for the gate for quite awhile, including figuring out the design and buying tools, so when it came time to actually build the gate, it didn’t take too much time at all.  Overall, it took about 1 week or so (maybe ~20 hours of actual work) to build the gate.

Here are the finished two gates that will span the narrow driveway, sitting on our back deck.

building redwood craftsman gate

Continue reading “Designing and Building A Redwood Craftsman Fence Gate (for under $200)”

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Home Improvement – Driveway and Fence

One of the big areas of our yard that needed some improvement was the driveway side of our house. The side of the house (you could maybe call it a driveway, though it’s not really wide enough to drive a car on, at least if you want to open the doors) was never really finished but was more of a overgrown weed patch that needed to be cut back every once in awhile. Plus if you look at the pictures of our neighbor’s fence, you’ll understand why we wanted to tackle this project. We hesitate to put too many “before” pictures . . .

This project was too big to tackle ourselves, so we had our contractor Mohsen come and pour a new concrete side driveway, build a new fence and lay a paver front driveway for our car.

The view on the side of the house looking towards the street.

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