Iron gates fail in predictable ways, and most of them trace back to something decided before a single piece of steel was cut: where the posts went, how the driveway slopes, whether anybody checked how the gate would behave in August when the metal has been in full sun since ten in the morning. A gate is not a fence panel with hinges. It is a moving structure carrying its own weight on two points, and it has to keep doing that thousands of times a year without sagging, dragging or pulling the post out of plumb.
People use the terms interchangeably, and in the yard they often get built from similar stock, but they ask for different things from the installer. A wrought iron gate installation is usually about security and span — heavier square tube in the frame, solid pickets, a straightforward picket-and-rail layout, sometimes sheet backing behind the lower section so nobody reaches through to the latch. The engineering is the hard part: a wide driveway opening in a single leaf puts enormous leverage on the hinge side, and the fix is either a diagonal brace worked into the design, a heavier gauge frame, or splitting it into two leaves.
An ornamental iron gate installation shifts the difficulty to fabrication and finish. Scrollwork, cast rosettes, twisted bar, spear tops, arched top rails and custom panel infill all mean more joints, and every joint is a weld that has to be ground, filled and blended so it disappears under paint. Ornamental work also adds weight in awkward places — a heavy cast medallion set high in the leaf changes where the load sits and how the gate wants to swing. Badly done, you see it within a year: lumpy welds telegraphing through the finish, scrolls that don't mirror each other across the two leaves, and a decorative top rail that has started to flatten because nothing underneath it was carrying the span.
Around Vernon and the neighbourhoods either side of it, most residential openings are older than the cars that use them. Driveways run narrow between two structures, aprons slope toward the street for drainage, and the ground on one side has often settled differently from the other. That slope decides a lot. A swing gate on a rising driveway will bind on the ground partway through its arc unless the bottom rail is cut with clearance built in, the hinges are set to lift the leaf as it opens, or the whole thing becomes a slide gate instead. Slide gates solve the slope and solve short driveways where you can't give up the swing radius, but they need clear track length alongside the opening and a track or cantilever rail that stays clear of debris.
Posts get set in concrete footings sized to the gate, not to the fence beside it. Shallow footings on a heavy ornamental leaf are the single most common reason a gate that hung true in month one is scraping the apron by month eighteen. If the gate will be automated, now is the time to say so — the operator pad, the conduit run for power and the loop or photo eye wiring all want to be in the ground before the concrete goes down, and retrofitting them later means breaking up new work. Also worth raising before anything is built: a pedestrian or driveway gate should not swing out over a public sidewalk, which in tight lots in Maywood, Bell, Huntington Park and Boyle Heights often forces an inward swing or a slider.
Ask what gauge and section the frame is, not just the pickets. Ask how the steel is prepared and coated — bare mild steel wire-brushed and painted will rust from the bottom rail up, especially where lawn sprinklers hit it, so look for proper cleaning, a rust-inhibiting primer and a finish you can touch up. Ask whether hinges are adjustable and greasable, how many are on each leaf, and what the plan is for the drop rod or keeper on a double gate. Ask how it locks, and whether the latch is reachable from outside through the pickets. Ask what happens to the gaps at the hinge and latch stiles once the gate is hung, because that is where fingers and pets get caught.
Cost moves on opening width, leaf count, swing versus slide, frame weight, the amount of ornamental detail and hand-formed work, the finish system, how much demolition and concrete the posts need, and whether automation is going in. Get those spelled out on the quote. A gate drawn properly and footed properly is a thirty-year piece of hardware; one that isn't becomes a yearly argument with a grinder.