A bar of paraffin wax will keep wooden drawers and zippers sliding, too.

An old candle will do in a pinch.

------------------------------

I love wood as a building material.

It's very forgiving and sometimes can be a real brainteaser to figure out.

This past week I finally fixed the wooden gate to the back yard.

We bring in the groceries thru that gate so I'd find myself, hands full walking into the gate that dragged on the concrete walkway.

I must have looked like a cartoon character running into it everytime, so I looked at it and pondered over the problem for a week.

I thought it was the hinges so I played with them and put new screws/bolts in....nothing.

When it rained, the wood on the post would swell up and the gate opened perfectly! So I looked at the post the gate hung on and saw that it was bowed. The next step? A fix.

I thought about exactly how to fix it and figured it out.

I wet the post for the better part of a day, when it straightened out I nailed two steel metal straps along the side of the post to keep it from bowing again.

It works like a champ. The only drawback?

All the brain cells I burnt out thinking about how to fix it!