Baby Gate creativity needed!

[Melanie]

My stairs are wrought-iron with wood on the top, connecting to a wood base at the bottom which has trim that hangs over. That side does not have any two pieces which line up to hook something on to. The bottom sticks out further than the top, and is elevated. The other side is a wall. What on earth do I use?

Thank You


Mommy to Jonah

There are some free-form 'baby corral' systems that will let you fence off an arbitrary area.

Our situation was difficult too - and even using the corral system there was no way to exclude the stairs without also excluding the door - and I needed something the dog could pass through that the baby couldn't. Nope!

I ended up going gateless. My stairs are carpeted and enclosed on the sides with drywall, and my daughter has never tried to go down them. She is very cautious about stairs naturally, so I've been lucky so far.

We actually did not put a gate at the top of our stairs. The nursery was at the end of the hall so we put a gate in the hallway between my daughter's room and the stairs. If necessary, you can put the gate at a diagonal angle to avoid closets, doors whatever else is there.

We also did not let her roam without supervision at the bottom of the stairs (we had a separate area fenced off downstairs for those times we couldn' t look at her directly).

We bought a wide, soft gate that is designed to brace between two walls with tension rods and just slide it between the wrought iron railings at the foot of our stairs. The base of our staircase has wrought iron railings on both sides, so this worked out fine for us. It's not actually anchored, and if he really wanted to, DS could probably move it if he was left to his own devices for long enough. So far, he's never tried.