Wooden Gates are hugely popular in the UK. They can be beautiful and wood is ideal for many different designs. But now, many wooden gates are being replaced by aluminium gates. Why is this? Read on and you’ll see why the benefits of wooden gates cannot beat the best alternative for your driveway gates.
Wooden gates will eventually rot no matter how much they are painted or treated. Wood also absorbs water when it’s wet and dries out in the sun. Consequently, wooden gates change size; they expand when wet and shrink as they dry out. This means that hinges have to deal with the changing weight of the gates they support. Paint cracks and joints slowly open up.
Wood is beautiful but it will weather and eventually look less beautiful.
In an ideal world, it would be possible to buy gates made in a lighter but stronger material. It would be possible to buy gates that had a finish that made them look almost exactly like wooden gates. This finish would be guaranteed for ten years and require nothing more than a wipe down with a wet cloth to keep it looking new. And these miracle gates would cost the same as the equivalent hardwood wooden gates.
So are the pictures on the right of wooden gates or aluminium gates? They’re both aluminium of course.
The following images show a few examples of our customers’ old wooden gates and their replacement aluminium gates.