'baby gate' from tornado wood

After my v. exhausting upholstery project, I really wanted to do a low-effort, high-reward project. And you know what that would be, right!? Hello happy tornado wood! In a few hours on Saturday afternoon, I built a wooden 'baby gate', so that the door to the sunroom went from this:

Those are the crates of our camping gear...

to this!!

Ahhh. I can't not use chunky hardware, right?

I'd been temporarily using the camping crates to help contain the kittens in the sunroom since they learned to climb the plastic baby gate - then yesterday I had this great idea!

It's barely a tutorial to explain because it was so easy. I measured and cut (roughly), sanded the boards a little, and screwed them together using my favorite wood screws with the cool heads:

I lined up all the screw head directions to be parallel-aligned when done screwing in. It was v. satisfying.

Then I did a quick stain - for the trunk I had used up my Early American by Minwax, but Lowe's was out of that when I went to grab some yesterday, so I tried Early American by Rustoleum since they claimed a shorter dry time (due to their 'nanopigments'...that made me laugh). I will give it another try, but overall I don't like this stain as well. While it did dry quickly, it didn't soak in as well as Minwax, and has more of a reddish finish to it.

I tried something new, too - I assembled first and then stained. It is much easier to stain one item than 13 items, but harder to make sure you get in all the cracks. Here's the drying product:

We had a huge rainstorm last night - so I was pretty lucky I finished this yesterday afternoon!

I would have worked on more coats or another stain, but I was seriously tired of the camping trunks and wanted this to be a one-day project. I can always work on it again another day!

Then I hung the gate using some chunky $2.49 hardware from Lowe's. Because that's how I like to roll!

I photoshopped out the litter box for you. You're welcome :)
I had to use this photo because of the cute leaping kitten!

I made the gate so that it opens into the sunroom. I have a latch to put on the gate, but so far the kittens haven't figured out how to open it, so I haven't bothered. I'm kind of curious to see how long it will take them to figure it out...

From the sunroom side you can see how I made it flat on the kitten side so they can't climb up it. And you can see the reddish tinge to this stain compared to the trunk of kitty things, and how the stain didn't take as evenly.

 I might pop it off its hinges another day to touch up that stain job, but for now, am relishing how easy it is to come and go from sunroom with kittens!

Note: I call 'tornado wood' the weathered wood from our fence that fell over when our house was hit by a tornado this spring. If you've missed my other tornado wood projects, you can check them out here!
Early American Trunk
Dark Walnut Kitchen Shelves
Distressed Cabinet Makeover
Whitewashed Beach Crate