Hacks on How to Fix a Large Sagging Wood Gate

I have a pretty big two part fence on our driveway gate and one side is really sagging, it’s really bad and the other one’s only a little bit bad, but we’re gonna fix that issue. I was kind of in a rush trying to get it all done and one of the things that I totally skipped over was bracing the gate better. Over time, we’ve had this for about a year and a half now, it’s sagged pretty much right into the middle and now it drags on the driveway. I was going to come back and get to that and it just kept getting put off and off and now we’re going to go ahead and fix the issue. The angle of the fence on one side goes one way and on the other one, it goes that way, sloping right in the middle. And it’s dropped by about 2 inches or so over the course of two years. One gate is not as long so it’s not as heavy and it hasn’t dropped as much, but it still has dropped about roughly inch and a half or so. What we’re going to be doing is using 2×4’s to brace it. One of the things that you may want to do is try to brace it from the top latch corner to the lower hinge corner not from the lower latch corner to the top hinge corner because you won’t be supporting the bottom corner very much at all, you’re going to be putting more weight right into the middle. What we’re going to end up doing is bracing it from the middle towards the outside bottom corner.

The first thing that I’m going to be doing before I do any kind of fitting of 2×4’s is to make sure that I get the gate more level than it is. What I’m going to be doing is cutting some 2×4 material and the best way to do this is get something a little bit longer than what you’re going to need and put a screw higher than what you think. We’re going to screw it right into the base of the frame. I’ve got my level and what I can do is raise the gate up and use the two-by-four as a leverage point for where it’s going to be. Also, I’m just going to step back and look at it. I still think that it’s a little bit low, even though it says that it’s level because I don’t want it to look like the inside is higher.

Now I’m ready to go ahead and start mounting up my first brace. I’ve gotten one on the other gate and the easiest way I have found to do this is by just mounting it onto the actual gate and then coming back with a circular saw, cutting it off the extra pieces instead of trying to figure out all of your angles. If this had been done beforehand it would have saved time and a lot of wasted energy. This would have been a lot easier to have done flat on the ground. The fence is not sagging anymore, and it ended up not having to come up as much as I thought it was going to. I guess just because of how I was looking at it, but I went ahead and got the bottom cut, and got the tops cut. One thing that I will probably be adding on this is the wheels for gates so that when you open this gate it will support it all the time from the bottom side. If you leave the gate open it will put a lot of strain right back on the 2×4 and the screws and it will probably start to sag again.

That is how you fix a gate that is sagging, you put the cross braces on just like that from the bottom inside to the top outside, and then the weight from the gate will be pushing against the post and you’ll solve it that way. At the end of the day this was a headache job so I checked YouTube and did Hey Siri, Hey Alexa, and Hey Google searches and discovered better ways to solve a sagging driveway gate. The best gate brace to use is cables, turnbuckles, and eye bolts are great for a quick inexpensive fix for a sagging gate, shed door, or barn door, but they just don’t last, and they have a limited adjustment. By far the best way to get the sag out of a garden gate is to use a structural steel gate brace. These are made by several companies such as: True Latch, The Gate Brace, Adjust-A-Gate, Nuvo Iron, Homax, Stanley, National Hardware, and Tech Team. We happen to like the one made by Tech Team https://techteamproducts.com/  the best as this #734 is made from heavy duty 2mm welded steel construction with 6” of adjustment utilize a long M12 threaded rod. https://www.amazon.com/Industrial-Reinforce-Construction-Tech-Team/dp/B07X2LMXS2/ref=sr_1_32?keywords=gate+brace&qid=1581099336&sr=8-32. It is far superior to anything else available and does an absolutely excellent job.