DIY Baby Gate

Sometimes we start a project around here and I think “This is going to be a quick one… a baby gate? We can knock that out in a week.” Now I look back and think “oh Megan you fool.” I’d say realistically this is more of a 2 weekend project but of course if took us a month, mostly because painting isn’t quick. I think loads of people have tricky stairs to put a conventional baby gate on, ours surely included. Here are what our stairs looked like pre-gate.

Our problem was we didn’t have anything vertical on the left side of the steps to anchor a traditional gate to, and we wanted to work around the bottom step that sticks out. What we ended up doing was making an L shaped gate to wrap around the bottom step. On the left side Paul came off the wall and made a 90 degree angle around the step. We made sure to put the latch low enough because we didn’t want Theo to be able to reach it anytime soon.

We’ve had it installed for about a week, and man it makes life so much easier. As we were installing it, the thought hit me that we will never be in this house again without a baby gate. So thankfully we managed to build one that is easy on the eyes! We’ve got some bigger projects coming up, but a functional way to keep Theo safe was a necessary first step!