pour améliorer: Metal Trumps Timber

We've been wondering for a while what to do with the original boring and seen-better-days front door to our house.

It doesn't really make a lot of sense to have a full-sized flat door to an open verandah, does it?

Plus, we get beautiful breezes coming down the hill and sweeping through the verandah now, and that hard door stops them all in their tracks, so we have to chock it open, which as you can see from the above shot, messes with the beautiful symmetry of that little front balcony area and offers no security whatsoever!

So, something has to be done. I've been thinking for a long time about what options we might have for making a timber gate and a smaller security panel to go above the railing to the side. Since, let's be honest, making it super easy for burglars and the like to just leap right over and into the house is not really my idea of a good time.

And even after taking a couple of little scenic drives through suburbs like Chelmer and Graceville staring at all of the timber verandahs and checking out their gates, I couldn't come up with anything I liked the look of enough.

Add to that the fact that getting a timber gate and security panel custom-made would cost us an arm and a leg, and I was beginning to despair.

And then I thought of this gate that we had made for our last house.

We had asked a local steel fabricator to make it up for us, and rather than hand-drawing a fancy one-of-a-kind design and then hand-making everything, he bought pre-made decorative panels and then welded them all together for us. Much cheaper!

At first I immediately dismissed the idea of putting a steel gate on a timber house, but the more I thought about it it made sense! It would let air flow through beautifully, and the black colour would play off all of the other black trim on the house and even the little stained glass window. And, of course, it would look amazing!

Tom loved the idea, so I decided to borrow the steel guy's big brochure of pre-fabricated panels and muck around with possible designs.

In fact, I photocopied all of the relevant pages and then cut out the bits to play with them. Yes, I'm insane. Get over it.

It didn't take me too long to figure out that this had to be one of the most inefficient ways of designing something EVER. Particularly since the little pictures of each panel in the book weren't necessarily each in the same scale, so some panels that were smaller than others were actually pictured larger. Nightmare.

So I turned to my computer, and resized everything appropriately to muck around with it. Can't believe I didn't just do that first.

Anyway, this is the first option I came up with. And I loved it. But I had to take a step back. Given that in the beginning I didn't even plan on going for a wrought iron look, this design was upping the ante quite a lot. It would take eight of that main swirly panel plus others (translate that as $$$$), and in my opinion it was just a bit full-on. Too tizzy for this house.

So back to my virtual drawing board!

This was attempt number two. And as a more roomy (and therefore less tizzy) option certainly had the makings of a winner, but it wasn't quite wide enough to fill the full door space, and I couldn't figure out how to make up for that without adding weird squishy bits in the centre.

So we called the guy over for a proper meeting (and a measure-up of the space). He and I mucked around with various options, including putting an extra border around the edges, which I didn't much like. The option we eventually settled on was to add little straight pieces on the tops, bottoms and sides of each fancy panel, to widen the whole thing so that it would fill the frame size without having much visual impact. The same for the smaller security panel.

So with that plan in mind, I waited impatiently for him to order in the panels, weld it all together and then get it painted.

And a few weeks later... it has arrived!!!

This is my favourite kind of house job. Minimal physical exertion on my part but heaps of creative input, and then it's like you snap your fingers and the work is done! Oh, but then you get the invoice. Perhaps not my favourite.

But since you don't have to pay the invoice, you just get to enjoy this "voila, like magic!!" moment...

What do you think? Don't they look amazing?

I prefer this view.

And as you can see, they play beautifully with the stained glass window and its little black window-sill.

From the street they're not super-obvious, which isn't a bad thing in my opinon, since it's not immediately obvious that we've added tizzy metal bits to our all-timber house.

But then again, they look amazing, so who cares that we've added metal bits, right?

Someone else is particularly enjoying the ability to personally greet each visitor to the door. She's such a lady. As you can see, I've attempted to preserve her doggy dignity.