One of the great things about the location of our house, aside from the fact that we are surrounded by great neighbors, is that it is located on the end of a dead end street. Calle Sin Salida. No where to go but our house once you turn down our road. That means two things:

1. No drive by noises (loud mufflers and radios 25 feet from our bedroom window)
2. The only cars coming down our driveway are either lost or coming to our house

Before we had any landscaping at all, the lost drivers would just do u-turns in our front yard. Once we started planting, they would still do u-turns in our front yard (running over barely noticeable saplings and plants) and even now that we have green things planted EVERYWHERE in our front yard, we still deal with the occasional lost driver running over a baby tree to turn around or the FedEx or UPS driver taking out a few driveway lights or plants.

Regardless of all this, we always planned on putting up an entrance gate to keep the dogs in and unsolicited guests out. It was an expense that didn’t seem to large, so why not? Well, like every other project in the house, it was pricier than we thought. Building the wall took 2 pallets of 6” block, 60 bags of concrete, 3.5 meters of sand and three guys 20 hours to complete.

Now that it is done, I realize how much of an eyesore it was staring at those concrete posts for the past two and a half years. The wall looks great and will look even better once it is painted and we install the gate. We are probably going to install the gate on a slide mechanism with the option of hooking up a motor down the line. When we do that, we’ll add some sort of intercom and/or camera set up. Do any of you have any recommendations for us?

Before the wall was built (rainy day picture)
After the wall was built (sunny day picture)