Making Gates From Pallets

I recently made a couple different gates out of pallets, and I thought I'd explain how I approached the problem and how two different situations resulted in two different gate designs. Then I'll walk you through the steps I took to make one of the gates (the more interesting design, in my opinion). And finally I share a few lessons learned as well. None of this is intended to walk you through making your gate, that's your journey as a maker, although you're certainly welcome to copy my design. If you do, I'd appreciate feedback in the comments. Thanks.

Please note that you don't have to use pallets to make a gate. You're making a wooden gate and the wood happens to come from pallets. I use pallets because I can get them for free (you can, too!) and I'm not making fine furniture.

Since I'm not giving instructions on making a specific thing I'll just list the materials and tools I used. Costs will naturally vary by your gate design, available hardware, etc.

Pallets. Lots of pallets, all sizes. I was fortunate to get some 104 inch by 48 inch pallets with solid plywood tops. They were used to ship sofas to a furniture store. For my basement gates these provided some nice long 1x4 boards. I plan to use the plywood to make a workbench, perhaps a future Instructible. I find pallets free on Craigslist and Facebook Marketplace. The furniture store was happy to be rid of the big ones, and you can find lots of others willingly giving pallets away if you're patient. I usually accumulate a bunch, then spend a weekend dismantling them and stacking the wood by size.

Trim. For one of my gates I bought commercial lumber for the trim, to match the railing.

Gate hardware. I bought hinges and latches at a big box hardware store.

Fasteners. Nails, screws, staples, etc. Also dowels and wood glue. I used some left over deck screws and I bought some nails for my nail gun.

Glue and caulk. On the basement gate you'll see I used Liquid Nails to put it together, which turned out to be a mistake. So I used caulk. This will make sense when you get there. I used wood glue on the dowel joints.

Wire cloth. The basement gate closes off a fence, and I used some wire cloth left over from making the fence.

Wire cutters. Comes in handy with the wire cloth.

Saws. I have a compound miter saw which came in very handy cutting the diagonal braces. A hand saw will work if you're better than me :-)

Plane. Sometimes a gate is too large and you need to plane it down to fit the opening. Too big is better than too small.

Angle grinder and 120 grit flap disk. Sometimes you need to remove more than is practical with the plane. Way too big is still better than too small, but not much.

Screwdriver, hammer and stapler. For driving the fasteners.

Rubber hammer. For assembling the dowel joints and driving them snug.

Dowel jig, drill and bits. For drilling dowel holes.

The design of your gate will depend on the circumstances of your project. For one gate I needed to restrain dogs from leaving our deck while allowing a passage for people. Beyond function it needed to fit the ascetic of the existing deck railing. For the other I needed to restrain dogs in an area with a wire fence while allowing passage for people, furniture, appliances, etc. Beyond function it needed to be cheap.

The size of the gate is generally determined by the opening. In the case of my basement gate, for years we let our dogs out the basement door into the fenced dog area next to the house. Then we got a dog who liked to escape whenever he had the chance. He'd come home - eventually - but getting him from the basement to the dog area was difficult, so I threw up some leftover wire cloth as a temporary fix. In the first photograph the dog area is to the far left. It may be difficult to see but I used the existing deck posts to hold some wire cloth to make a temporary fence extension to enclose the landing outside the basement door.

The time had come to replace that with a proper gate. I'd essentially blocked anything from moving in or out of the basement, unless it went up or down the stairs.

So in this case I had to put a gate and fence in a space 122¼ inches wide. I decided that rather than divide that space with a post and only gate part of it, I would make a double gate. As it turns out, a very large double gate. I made each gate 61 inches wide and 48 inches high - the width of the wire cloth I had left over from making the fence. I thought about re-using the wire cloth already enclosing that space, but I needed to leave the existing fence until the gates were ready, so I used new wire cloth (but still stuff I had left over from before).

But for the deck gate it was another story. I was enclosing the deck, which wraps around the house ten feet wide and goes down three steps to the garage. I decided to simply build deck railing along the top step to match the existing railing around the outside, since the top step is the deck. I wanted a gate wide enough to pass deck chairs and other similar furniture, so I made the gate 39½ inches wide and went with a 40 inch opening. The railing is 37 inches high so I made the gate 36 inches tall, leaving a 1 inch gap at the bottom.

So why 39½ inches? In this case I had some nice pallet boards in 1x4 and 1x6, meaning their actual measure is ¾x3½ and ¾x5½ respectively. By alternating the boards I was able to use four 1x6s and five 1x4s, or 4 x 5.5 + 5 x 3.5 = 22 + 17.5 = 39.5 inches wide. So I built the gate first, set the new post 40 inches away from the existing post to fit the gate, and made the new railing from that new post to the side of the house, where I put another post to terminate the railing (as was done at the other end, not pictured). Everything in the gate itself came off pallets, except the top board which I bought to match the rest of the railing.

Go online and look at gates. There's LOTS out there! I learned the diagonal brace should go from the bottom by the hinge to the top by the latch, and it should be no less than 45 degrees from horizontal. In the case of my basement gates I essentially made a pair of swing arm gates with 45 degree braces, then fully framed them in to hold the wire cloth to contain the dogs. And for the deck gate I just made a simple frame of 2x4s to hold the nine boards that make up the gate. I would attach the hinges and latches to the frames and posts.

I didn't take pictures of the deck gate construction, so I'll mostly talk about the basement gate.

I had this crazy idea that I could take 1x4s from pallets and sandwich them to make 2x4s. What's more, I could stagger them to overlap the joints for added strength. So as you can see in my plans one half has the horizontal boards longer and the other has the vertical boards longer. Where boards butt-joined I used ¼ inch dowels for reinforcement. Then - and this was the brilliant part - I would put the two halves together with the wire cloth between them! This turned out to be a reasonable idea, but not as brilliant as I thought.

I started construction by selecting the shortest boards for each piece, to minimize waste. As I said earlier I was very fortunate to get some 104 inch long pallets, which provided several 104 inch long 1x4s. They weren't perfect, and as with all pallet wood there were nail holes and other damage, but as I only needed 61 and 58 inch boards and was able to use the best part of the 104 inches, avoiding most of the damage.

Then I cut each board per my plan, drilled holes for the dowels with the jig, dry fit everything to figure out assembly order, then assembled each half with wood glue on the dowels and the mating butt joint surfaces.

When I was done I had four gate halves, all constructed on the cement slab outside the basement door. There were two problems, one is that cement slabs are not inherently flat, and the other is neither are pallet boards. As a result, when I sandwiched the two halves together they didn't fit well and there were large gaps. But all things considered I believe they're better than I should have expected.

Next we have to take the gate frame halves and put them together. But remember, the wire cloth goes between them. So I stapled the end of the roll of wire cloth to one end of a frame, and rolled it out across the frame. The trick is to have loose staples so you can make adjustments. You don't want the wire sticking out beyond the wood. When you have it where you want it, staple it down well and cut it to fit the frame.

Then I put Liquid Nails on the half with the wire cloth, carefully laid the other half on top, and nailed them together. Frankly this did not go as planned. I'd say only about half the liquid nails actually touches both boards, leaving large gaps. I elected to fill the gaps with caulk, which took way too long. I've got some lessons learned at the end to discuss these mistakes. But in the end I think it turned out alright, even if it took longer than expected (by a few days).

Hanging these big beasts was a bit more difficult than I anticipated. I hung the first gate easily enough, but hanging the second gate at the same height as the first was tricky. As you can see in the pictures I held it at the correct height with wood scraps. The trick was finding the right combination of thicknesses to get it level and at the same height as the other. Get them the same height where they meet and it's not level. Change the height at the hinges to make it level and now it's the wrong height where they meet. I went back and forth until it was good enough.

The gates were too long and interfered with each other, so I had to plane and grind them down to have a reasonable gap.

The last task was the latches. One puts a vertical rod into the ground to hold one gate, another latch connects them. The pictures show how they go. I drove a 6 inch piece of ½ inch galvanized iron pipe into the ground to fit the vertical latch for a more secure anchor.

With the deck gate I learned that a solid wood gate is quite heavy, and I needed more bracing on the post that held the hinges. I solved this by anchoring the other post against the house, using the railing in tension to help hold the hinge post against the weight of the gate.

With the basement gate I learned that pallet wood isn't perfectly flat. I knew that, but I didn't foresee how badly the two halves of my gates would fit together. In retrospect I would still glue one side together with dowels, but I would staple the wire cloth to that half then fasten the pieces of the other half individually, without dowels, so that they were more closely pressed against their other half. Then perhaps Liquid Nails would be a better idea. But you would have to use it right to the edge of the boards to seal out water, so you're back to caulking.

I think the ultimate solution would be to paint the gates inside and out first, then sandwich them together and forget the caulk, just leave the gap. I still haven't decided whether I'll paint this gate or just leave it. I might give it a few years and see how it holds up.

The final lesson is time. After more than a month the wood has swelled and I have to do more trimming with the grinder and plane. Don't be surprised if yours does the same.