GATES

General information can be found by scrolling through the Gate Price Table

1.  How do we calculate how many panels we need?

--There is an Example Layout guide on the site, linked by scrolling below the Price table.  This serves to explain just exactly how to calculate your costs prior to contacting CPW.  But basically, translate your given fence runs into inches and divide by 70" to get the number of panels required.  Panels are a maximum of 64" width, and yet calculated to equal widths over a given run of fence. 

2.  Can the panel designs be modified?

--Yes.  If you have a defining feature or architectural element worth noting, please send us a jpeg of what might be considered visually upon approaching your fence-line.  We will look to incorporate this into the fence panels and in this manner, your fence will serve to enhance and compliment what exists, rather than upstage it.

3.  What is the maximum length of each panel?

--64".   I told you that already.

4.  Do you have any privacy fences?

--From both a designer's point of view as well as that of social protocols, privacy fences are uneventful and unneighborly.  And yet there are obviously situations that require and request solid panel fences.  The proximation to high-trafficked streets, for one, where you may have an issue regarding the safety of your children, or the sounds levels that prevent normal conversations in your front yard.  We offer one solid panel style, Fence #20 . . . maybe more.  If you prefer such a fence, CPW will make it for you and it will be a work worthy of the kudos and comments of your neighbors that never reach your own ears simply because your neighbors do not have access to you.  You have distanced yourself from them. 

5.  How do I set my posts?

--There is a link on the Fence Cost Page to Post Setting that will illustrate the preferred method for setting your posts, and make the difference between a post that last 30-40 years and a post that begin rotting in 7. 

6.  Do you provide posts and caps?

--Normally, no. The added cost of crating posts and their shipping weight have you paying a premium beyond what is available at your local lumber yard.  because we do not mark up the post cap, we offer direct links to where you can purchase these online at a cost much better than your local outlet.  These are through Island Post Cap, the original developer of the post cap and someone we have been doing business with for 35 years now. 

7.  Do we need to stain or seal the panels?

Yes.  It is essential to seal those panel designs with lower solid plank panels particularly, as the seal stabalizes the dimensional swelling and shrinking as the wood acclimates itself to your local climate over the first few weeks and months. Whether you decide to stain, oil, or paint your panels, however, be aware that there is a maintenance timeline, found on the Finishes page.  If paint is allowed to go too long without maintenance, it will crack and peel, and thus require a fair amount of prep prior to any re-application.  Stains and oils will simply face out gradually, losing their color.  The best and longest-lasting finish is by Sikkens.  A 2-part application with a dozen or so earth tint colors.  For actual color, you will need a pigmented stain, and we suggest Cabot Stains.  For gates that want the weathered look, a simple clear coat initially, and then nothing more ever again. 

8.  How are your fence panels constructed?

The panels are joined, as in wood joints.  Their actual assembly is free of nails, screws, and errant hardware.  They are mounted to the posts, however, with 6" exterior grabbers.  Six screws per panels, within their pre-bored holes.

9.  How are the panels installed?

Between the posts using the mounting screws set to the six pre-bored holes.  For extended fence-lines, this procedure is covered in depth in the PDF Installation Guide, found under the Site Map, on the Fence Cost Page, and accompanying all shipments.  Basically, string a line along the fence-line, set the two end posts, and work your way down, setting a post, mounting a panel, setting a post, mounting a panel, etc.  The posts are set, at this juncture, in pea gravel, allowing for final adjustment before setting them to a 6" cap of concrete.

1. Do we need a steel frame for our drive gates?

--As discussed on the Drive Gate General Information and Cost Page, if the overall width exceeds 12', your gates are embedded with a steel frame for structural rigidity, with an overall gate thickness of 3".  If the width is 12' or less, the gates are 2-1/4" thickness and require no steel frame, mounting to your wood posts or columns with our adjstable tube steel hinges or standard 4" ball-bearing butt hinges.  Whichever your contractor is comfortable with.

2.  Do we need an automation contractor?

--If your gates are to be automated, then you need an automation contractor.  They will provide you with a quote for steel posts--when necessary--the steel frame--when necessary--as well as the appropriate motors and communication needs, such as options of a simple remote to a more versatile keypad and intercom.  We can often refer various Automation Contractors in your area who have installed CPW gates in the past.  These names are available because they have receive high marks from previous patrons.  But the list is woefully inadequate, as so few homeowners supply us with this information. 

It is not entirely uncommon, for the smaller gates, to see a handy homeowner tackle the automation themself using the user-friendly armature style motors such as the Miracle Elite 100.  The various motors and discussion are tackled on the Drive Gate Specifications page.

3.  Should we use wood posts, steel posts, or columns?

--For overall widths less than 12', you can use 6x6 wood posts.  For widths over 12', you will need to use either steel 6x6 posts or masonry columns.  Often, with steel posts--even occasionally with existing wood posts--CPW's Gate Column Wrap is introduced to bring the entire assembly together as a single aesthetic consideration. This obviously reduces your overall opening width, by approximately 2-3/16" from each post.  The Columns are also offered as lighted.

4.  Swing direction--out or in?

--If your driveway slopes up, toward the residence, you may need to have your gates open out, toward the street.  The alternative is to have the gates set high enough off the drive, when closed, so they will clear the high point of the rising drive slope when fully open.  You can determine this height by laying a flat 2x4 from the proposed gate setting to half the overall width up the drive.  using a level, you will raise the end of the 2x4 at the gate end and measure the distance between the bottom of the 2x4 and the drive surface.  It should be noted that with out-swing drive gates, the armature on the motor requires more clearance, robbing the rough opening width by approximately 13".  If the motors are exposed, mounted to the street side of the gates, this is avoided, but the unsightly view of the motors is a trade-off.
Remember:  Out-swing gates lose about 13" of clearance if the motors are mounted on the inside, resulting in the motor arm 'pushing' the gate open.

You can also opt for the SEA below grade motors, allowing for out-swing (or in-swing) with a motor that is set below the drive surface.

Most communities have an ordinance that no drive gate can swing out unless it is set a minimum of 12' in from the street.  Obviously this is to avoid your vehicle from stopping in the street, waiting for your gates to open and allow you to access your drive. 

5.  How much do they typically weigh?

This depends on the wood. A double gate for a 12' opening (meaning two 6' wide gates), at 6' height, at 2-1/4" thickness, will weight approximately 125 lbs in western cedar.  200 lbs in Southern Cypress and Port Orford Cedar.  For an openinbg of, say, 16', with two 8' gates, will have each gate, with it's embedded steel frame,adding approximately 85 lbs to the above weights.

6.  What are the advantages of a wood gate over a wrought iron gate?

Typically, the benefit of solid panels for privacy.  And the aesthetics of wood over iron. 

1.  Are the columns solar powered?

No.  After an investment of two years toward research and development of a solar-powered Landscape Lighting Column, we finally arrived at a unit that could provide solid and acceptable illumination even during the length of a New England winter.  But, alas, we ran into a roadblock with securing the preferred solar panels from the Argentinian manufacturer.  Their inventory was being gobbled up by the German Government.  So we gave up and moved ahead with this product, offered as a hard-wired unit requiring low-voltage wiring.  Had it been the States gobbling up the Argentinian's inventory, we would have felt much better.  But America appears no more capable of conservation and alternative-minded options than a barnyard cow could be expected to recite poetry.  It seems we're heading backward from our last responsible energy policy way back in the Carter Administration. Doesn't it ever occur to you how obscene it is that the notion of poles and wires outside your home have not changed, have not been improved or advanced since Edison wired J.P. Morgan's home in NYC?  By golly it's time for a change in the national sentiment, away from an oil-based energy consumption, away from the minimum nutrition of fast food outlets, from the fertilizers and steroid-fed livestock and while we're at it, from the chain box stores that have homogonized our choices and robbed us of the once healthy, thriving downtowns?  It's scary how this dilemna is not even recognized by so many Americans as a dilemna at all.  Why, in Kentucky they are proud of their fast food options and their Wall Marts, while turning a blind eye to the rampant decimation of their once thriving little villages, boarded up for twenty years now. 

2.  Do we need an electrician?

Probably.  Unless you are handy with low-voltage, supplying the Column area with trenched wiring. The Lighted Columns arrive with the wiring stubbed out, the extra length of wiring fed out through the bottom of the Column for a fairly simple junction below grade. 

3.  How do they fasten to the posts?

This is covered in detail on both the Installation Guide, as well as the Gate Column General Information and Cost Page.  The Columns arrive as 3-sided assemblies that are simply slipped around your post, insuring your wiring is fed out at the bottom before mounting the fourth side to the assembly with the provided screws, plugs in the pre-bored holes. 

4.  Do they arrive fully assembled?

Didn't I just address this concern in the above item?  So I need to repeat myself.  The columns arrive as 3-sided assemblies.  The fourth side is mounted once the Column has been slipped around your post and secured to your post.  For wood posts, the columns are secured using the provided screws and pre-bored holes.  For steel posts, it is necessary use the provided bolts, set to the pre-bored holes but requiring you to drill through the steel post on site.  Okay, maybe I didn't cover it quite so thoroughly in the above item.  I apologize.

5.  Should we seal or stain the columns?

Advisable. You will probably want to remove the plexiglas backing behind the grids before doing so.  Also, be certain to give the underside of the Column cap the same seal as the upper, exposed side of the cap.  otherwise it will cup and warp.

6.  Can we use timers for the lights?

Yes.  The timer can easily be installed within the column near where the transformer is located, but your access to it becomes cumbersome, as you must remove the cap, remove the light fuxture and it's supporting shelf, to gain access.  So it really is far more prudent to simply mount the timer near the bottom of the Column, where it is more or less unnoticed, but accessible. 

7.  Can we choose a different plexiglas color?

Hmmm.  This would involve having us physically shop for your preferred color, as in leaving the shop.  This simply because we are unable to order the specific sizes we use in anything other than large sheets, which are then cut to size in the shop.  I imagine someday we may carry an inventory of options on the plexiglas, but really, what's better than a white light?  Bearing this in mind, however--you can easily remove the plaxiglas panels from the Columns and replace them with your own preference. 

8.  What are those light holes in the cap?

They are a feature whose sole intention is to solicit breathless gasps from your guests who arrive and depart in the absolute darkness.  The columns, you see, are invisible in the total darkness.  There is only the light splayed through the grid pattern, and the small throws of light escaping through the weep holes in the cap to be thrown against the underside of the cap overhang.  A stunning feature that will, in the event of stalled dinner conversations, rescue you with the aplomb of a proud offspring. 

--So who designed it?  You?

At this juncture--January 2006--everything on the CPW site was designed  by myself.  But this is changing, as Paul Lombardi, of the Portland shop, is an extraordinarily talented designer and craftsman.  I would imagine we'll see more and more of the basic design and development carried out in Portland.  To ignore what Paul possesses, would be like riding a bike and ignoring the pedals, propelling yourself along by the souls of your tennies.

--So what's so hot about Paul? 

Is this you again?  Are you back?  You keep breaking the rules.  One question per visitor.  Don't you have anything else to do but break my rules?

--Well, truth is, I'm forming a new company.  We're stealing everything of yours and calling it our own.  It's legal.  I checked with a lawyer first.  He says you'll never go to the trouble of suing us. 

Well you're not the first.  There are innumerable knock-off efforts, scattered everywhere.  It reminds me of the Union Army.

--Union Army?

The Union Army was this procession, this traveling cornucopia followed everwhere they marched by a veritable city of parasites, of whores and vendors and scavengers, the whores who infected the soldiers with disease and the vendors who sold to the army at exagerated prices and the scavengers who scoured the battlefields on the morning after a battle, collecting boots and belts and anything of value from the dead bodies, selling it all back to the vendors who sold it back to the same traveling battalions.  Because there was simply no way to stop this practice--the Union soldiers too exhausted from the day's fighting to parole the battlefield and guard the dead--it continued throughout the duration of the war.  Anyway, one thing you cannot replicate is Sir Teddy.

--Sir Teddy? 

Sir Teddy.  Our aging Mascot.  The West Highland Terrier responsible for all of our intuitive decisions.  You cannot bribe him.  Unless, well . . . he does have this damnable weakness for Pekenese. 

1.  What do the arbor assemblies include?

It really depends on the particular arbor style.  Normally, they are provided with any joined panels and cross-beams.  This may arrive to you as an entire assembly, lifted at once onto the top of your posts and bolted in place with the provided bolts.  The full assemblies are of course air dried and their overall assembled weight is well within the range for two men to mount comfortably. 

2.  Do they arrive fully assembled?

Most styles do arrive fully assembled. While other arbors are nothing more than a single Valance Panel, which mounts between your posts.

3.  Does CPW provide the posts?

We do not provide the posts, as the added crating and shipping raise the cost of the posts considerably more than what you will pay at your local lumber yard, even as special order cedar posts from an east coast supplier. 

1.  Why are CPW Furnishings scheduled out so far?

-Uh. well, because it takes a lot longer to make a piece of furniture than it takes to make a gate?

2.  We have several retail furnture stores in the northeast and would like to carry an exclusive line of CPW Furnishings.  Will you provide a wholesale cost to us?

-Of course.  Let us know what piece it is that interests you and the volume of your needs, and one of the staff will provide you with a cost, inlcuding shipping.

  3.  Staff? 

-Whoever answers the phone.

  4. We prefer to work with Leaders.

No, child.  I am a figurehead.  Like Betty Crocker and Ronald Reagan.  I answer Freqeuntly Asked Questions between 1:30 and 2:00 p.m. the third Tuesday of every month following those months with 28 days.  I work mostly from templates, I might add. 

THE WEB SITE

1.  Your site is a visual feast.  Who designed it?

--I did.  With valuable contributions from my sister Anne Prowell.  But for the most part every section was designed and created by myself.  Anne launched the first coded version, in 1996.  All of five pages.  It's grown since, to something like 750 pages.  We are currently training #1 son, Sam Prowell, to maintain the site.

2  Are you responsible for the comic relief that appears randomly throughout the Site.

--Maybe.  It depends. 

3. How do you achieve such high listings? 

--The Site is repeatedly being optimized, a formula I unraveled years ago, first when Yahoo was the leading engine, and then altering that approach when Google rose to power.  We have maintained number one listings on page 1 with 37 primary keywords, and within the top four listings of page 1, another 63 keyword listings.  Optimizing is probably the single most valuable skill to the success of any web site.  Most webmasters don't understand it, or don't have the patience to understand it.  They are distracted with building a Site that utilizes all the fashionable bells and whistles, but not the complexities of optimization. But without the top listings on search results pages, you have a site that is simply not available to potential visitors. 

4.  So what's the secret, Mr. Know-It-All?

--There are approximately 100 different steps to successfully optimizing a web site.  It is a long and tedious process that shuns the automated aids such as style sheets and tempates and plays into the strengths of a hands-on approach to coding.  My strengths. An optimizer, or SEO, will charge upwards of $3-5,000 dollars, possibly more, and this is not an investment you should make without seeing the proof of earlier successes.  Ask to be directed to other sites they have overseen, contact the site to insure the optimizer was in fact involved, and then study the listings of that site.  The optimizing industry is rampant with false claims.

5.  How about a tip.

--It might be hard to swallow, but the spiders crawling the site for a search engine have human characteristics.  They appreciate humor.  Comic relief.  They return to a site rampant with this favorable ballast simply to get a laugh now and again and each time they return, the site is renewed and freshened and hence appears even more relevent to a given search.  This human spider thing is an aside and not a purposeful affect, as the coders for Google are simply too busy taking over the world to be bothered with a good laugh.

6.  So you represent an interesting phenomenon in today's business environment.  You are rooted in one of the world's oldest trades, woodworking, and yet alongside that one of the world's newest trades, computer technology.  Your acumen with this technology has allowed you to forge a business template that would have been unheard of ten years ago, even last year. I read somewhere on the Site that the entire business is networked not only on a hosted firewall server, but on an internet VOiP phone system.  That is not a technology that, well . . .that is available for prime time, as they say.  Are there other innovations to the status quo of business?

--Hmmm.  Well, there is no paper associated with CPW.  Virtually no paper trails whatsoever.  All transactions, invoices, contracts, statements, etc are digital and remain digital.  Even in-coming faxes arrive digitally. Our banking is not only entirely online, but even the issuance of payments, to any recipient, is enacted online.  All venders, manufacturers, and suppliers are dealt with digitally.  Bookkeeping, accounting, and taxes as well. 

7.  Anything else?

--In our industry--that is, the genre of Custom Designs--the accepted process has always included a site visit, a free estimate.  We have not made a site visit in many many years.  This streamlines the efficiency of the business, the billable hours associated with any single commission.  We are also not involved with installation, eliminating a whole medley of unpredictable issues normally associated with the trade.  We employ seasoned American artisans at the top of their trade and insist on only one pair of hands from the start to the finish of every project.  We allow them to be removed from any distracting associations such as estimating and site visits and measuring and drafting and delivering and instead, the utter luxury of simply focusing on the work at hand.   To them, this is a gift from heaven.  To the patron, this is a gift from heaven.

8.  So you design from cyberspace, so to speak.

--Yes.  And oftentimes of an elaborate scope.  This is accomplished through jpeg images, CAD documents, and various presentation software sent from the site.  Embellished of course with conversations and verbal discussions.  This process can be anywhere from a single email or call, ordering something specific off the site, to several months of contact with site architects and contractors and homeowners before the fruition of our own dimensioned drawings that are eventually posted to the various shops.  The shops staffed by some of the finest craftsmen and artists in the country.   Which brings us back full circle.

7.  Full circle?

--Hands-on.  The skill of the craftsmen and the human interaction with every single patron.  There are no receptionists who answer the calls and emails.  No voice mails with endless options deferring you everywhere but to another human. And moreover, there are no overseas factories producing the multiple inventories of a volume-based business.  Every project is seen through from start to finish by the hands of a craftsman who, by the nature of his trade, bases the success or failure of any given day's existence on the love of his work, the act of an immediate, focused presence with the tools and the work as it evolves from the first cut to the final sanding.  As a woodworker, you are by default, a Zen Master.