To go along with our blog here about life with our crazy Newfie, we also keep a blog about our house. A little over a month ago, I wrote a few posts about our front gate breaking (read here and here for details as well as our repair not working here). There seemed to be no rhyme or reason for it and it seemed unrelated to the other problems we had with it during the cold (read here).

Today I started to formulate a new theory about what might have happened to the gate…and it’s name is Ayla. Usually when I’m working at home, I sit in the office. I have everything I need within reach and basically sit there all day, aside from when I get up to let the dog out or in. But today I’m working from the kitchen table because the contractor was here and planned to install the door to the office so I didn’t want to be in the way or trapped in the room while he worked. Sitting at the dining table, I’m able to see into the courtyard better and as I went to put my dishes from lunch in the sink, I glanced out the window and saw doggo sitting in front of the right side of the gate mechanisms, wagging her tail.

I immediately think that maybe someone is standing outside the gate talking to her. It’s a small town, people are aware of us because we have a huge dog and we’re new in town – it could happen. So I step outside to investigate further and see that there is no person. She could have been playing with a bug I guess but I’m pretty sure that my suspicions are correct…

A few days ago, Ayla was playing in the courtyard during the evening. I walked outside and there was a strange collection of things laying around which I couldn’t really figure out where she’d found them. It was a shopping bag, a dust pan broom, some other junk and what I thought was the cover to one of the gate opening arms. But when I looked at the arms, everything seemed to be intact. So I just assumed that she’d snuck into a storage room or there were some things laying in the covered patio that we hadn’t noticed, most like that had been left out by the contractors.

So today when she was sitting there, I looked at bit more closely at the gate and it turns out that it wasn’t the cover from the top of the arm but the bottom. I also noticed that the cables running out of the arm are missing most of their paint and it would seem that the cover popped off when the cables were being pulled on because the cover doesn’t actually screw on but rather seemed to be glued or otherwise stuck on.

Here’s the entire right arm of the gate. The whole box is a hydraulic pump which opens the door.

On the ground is the cover for the bottom part of the mechanism where one of the cables feeds into the opener. You can also see some oil or hydraulic fluid has leaked out on the ground. This I noticed a few days ago but just couldn’t quite put all the pieces together yet.


Here is the cable I bit closer…as you can see there is no paint on the part of the cable which I would say with almost certainty was not the case when we moved in. The PO used some little cinches to hold the cables together and even used cable clips to mount part of the cable to the gate where it runs underneath the opener.


Do those indentations look a bit like bite marks to you??

These are the cables on the other side of the gate and you can see they’re nicely painted and all attached to the wall and so on.


So tomorrow there will be some closer examination of everything. I’m not very good with electronics and usually end up breaking them more than I improve them so I’m just going to wait until hubby is home for that. He is taking two days off to go run some errands, get us registered here finally and things like that…so we should be able to deal with this also. Very hopefully, we will discover that we don’t need to buy a new gate opener after all…and can use that money on another project around the house….or perhaps to build something that will allow Ayla to tug all she wants on something designated for that purpose. I have no idea what that would be but she loves to pull on stuff (she pulls the plants out of the flower beds all the time) so we have to come up with something or I’m afraid the behavior may continue on other things I don’t want her touching. Of course, keeping a much closer eye on her will also be a must and she’s going to get a lot less free time outside in the future.

(Reposted for the most part from our blog Our New Farmhouse in Germany)