The small gate is just four steps to your right!

[Harry Bloomfield]

Please use the small gate to your right

These large gates are for vehicle access only!

[Bob Eager]

How interesting.

[Andy Burns]

Err, OK.

Still, your missives do seem to be reaching plusnet's server now!

[Harry Bloomfield]

Bloody annoyed, so I thought the world ought to know why.

[Harry Bloomfield]

Harry Bloomfield laid this down on his screen :

A 12 foot wide drive gate, 'locked' with cheap spring link D, with an adjoining small garden gate just four steps away - yet I have now lost count of the number of numpties who spend an age trying to force a way through the big double gates, often damaging the lock in the process.

Fed up of knocking on the window (when there is someone in) - pointing at the small gate and fixing the damage. Why can't they see a second gate just six feet away from where they are battling, which is a matching three foot by four foot?

I have now resorted to an A4 printed sign covering the 'lock', which has to be moved to access the 'lock'.

[jgharston]

One house on my old leafletting round has a waist-high gate that would be at random intervals bolted about six inches from the ground on the inside. Every now and then I'd trip over the damn thing as I lifted the normal latch and advanced.

...and then the b***y idiots who hung their gate so it swings out over the pavement...

JGH

[Harry Bloomfield]

jgharston presented the following explanation :

Opening out into the road would have been so much easier, but dangerous for pedestrians and vehicles - so I went to a lot of trouble to show the gate guys how to offset the hinges to make them very neatly rise to clear the drive. Our drive slopes up from the the road. They didn't have any clues how to do it, or how to work out the offset - made a great job of the gates though (?).

That was around four years ago, within weeks of the gates being installed, we had a numpty collecting my car for service - try to force the gates to open out into the road, breaking the offset rising hinges system. The drive slopes up from the road, so the gate end (where they meet) has to rise as it opens in.

They buggered off leaving the broken gate across the pavement and partially out in the road.

[Steve Walker]

We have no gates. If we fitted some, we'd have to either have them open both ways (as my parents have) or concoct a fiendishly complicated folding system, as there'd be no room to open and close them when a car was on the drive - as there is 5 days and 7 nights a week. A sliding gate would be easier, but that would go through a tree and across where the footpath gate would have to go.

It's something I might look at at some point, but designing a pair of gates that fold into three sections each and with enough strength, but little enough load, that I could automate them is not my forte. They'd have to be automated, as parking outside is not always easy due to a school in the next road and I don't want to have to park up the road, run back in the pouring rain (Manchester) to open them, before rushing back to the car to come back and park it!

SteveW

[jgharston]

You'd think that with the established paradigm for the last 7,000 years being that doors/gates/etc open *into* the place you're entering that it would have sunk in slightly.

Though I did watch in disbelief some years ago as a houseguest tried to yank my bathroom door off while asking "how do I get in?" while I was saying "turn the handle and open the door".

JGH

[Jules Richardson]

Hmm... I built the gate on my dog kennel to open outwards, as otherwise if I wanted to get in there in winter I'd have to first jump the fence to shovel snow out of the way.

cheers

Jules

[jgharston]

Not sure I understand your description. Surely if the kennel gate opens outwards when there's snow piled up you can't open it precisely because the snow is stopping it open (outwards).

JGH

[John Williamson]

I read the post as the OP being able to dig the snow away from outside the gate as it is without jumping over it first. Snow he can reach easily as against snow he can't.

[RobertL]

And indoors they are hung such that such that occupants of the room can see the door opening before the opener gets a view into the room.

Robert

[dennis]

Neither being true though.

Gates frequently open out as there isn't enough space to close them again once the cars are on the drive. You may notice that garage doors don't open in for exactly that reason.

Doors in houses open into the rooms and in all the recent ones I have seen they open against the wall to maximise space. There is none of this privacy idea where all you can see is the wall.

[S Viemeister]

I've lived in a few places where the doors are hung opposite to that - the visitor can immediately see into the room. They were not recently built, though, dating from the late 1800s to the early 1900s.

[jgharston]

A badly designed driveway isn't an excuse to cause trip and collision hazards for users of the gateway.

A garage is a container, somewhat like a cardboard box, so of course the lid opens outwards, as does the trapdoor to the coalshed, cupboard doors, meter cupboard doors, inspection lids, the gateway to a cat- carrier, etc.

JGH

[Grimly Curmudgeon]

In modern rabbit hutches that might be the case where every square inch of space is at a premium, but in normal housing the door always/should open into the room so that modesty/warning is preserved. After all, you really need the split second to get your hand out of the owner's wife's skirt.

[Steve Walker]

For most people in houses built in the thirties, the length of the driveway is limited to the distance bewtween the public footpath and the front of their house. It's not bad design, it's simply a consequence of the designers of the time not knowing the needs of 70-odd years later.

I can get my kitcar down the side of the house (with a few inches each side), but a normal family car will not go past the corner of the house. Hence we have no gates at the moment. But the need may arise (young kids, animals, etc.)

SteveW

[Chris J Dixon]

Don't forget that, unlike any gates installed at the time the houses were built, it seems that you are now required to have them far enough from the kerb to permit a car to pull up to them and be clear of the carriageway.

Chris

[charles]

That was certainly the case here in 1964, so it's not that a new requirement.