Our deck wraps around three sides of the house. It had the main stair, and a long one on the two story side. Then I fenced in the upper yard, cut a section out of the end of the east end of the deck and added stairs down into what we call The Swamp (here in the desert portion of WArshington, it isn't much in the way of a swamp).
All this meant adding gates to coral our two buddies. A friend gave me some aluminum pipe from his railing project, and some conduit from a tear-out they did at his place of work. I used these materials and the off-cuts from a house build next door to make gates. These gates work well for our 60-70 pound dogs, but the wannabe dogs would call for one more pipe, or the smaller dogs can walk through, just like the cat does.
I added cheap door handles for quick latch and release.
This kind of gate could be mounted on a 1x4 and its removal would only require patching three small holes.
