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Which is better---the Safegate or the beechwood? Also, (this may be a dumb question) do you need a gate at the bottom and the top of the stairs if the nursery is upstairs and living area is downstairs?
Is pressure mounted better or worse than wall mounted?
I don't know Safegate from beechwood, but I can tell you that you will ultimately need a gate at the bottom as well as the top of the stairs. One day, Junior will be downstairs, and will realize that the stairs make a way cool climbing gym, and will be three steps up and rising rapidly before you know what's going on. (That's what happened to me!)
Pressure-mounted gates should only be used at the BOTTOM of stairs, or between rooms, because a strong baby can frequently push them over, or they can give way if they haven't been set up exactly right. My friend's son took a wild sled ride down his Grandma's stairs after he pushed over a pressure-mounted gate that was at the top. He was fine apart from some bumps and bruises, but it could have been a lot worse.
And there are _no_ dumb questions!! My sister the Emergency Room nurse wishes that people would ask them more often!
KathyO
Do you mean the Safeway Gate from Kidco?
There's probably no difference except which one you prefer the look of better. We have the Beechwood Gate just because I liked the look of it better--natural wood, so it goes with all the natural wood in the nursery.
We also have the Kidco PlayDen which is probably similar to the Safeway since it is white coated metal (from what I can tell). My son tries to chew on the rails, and the finish is holding up well. BabyCatalog sells the Safeway in a black finish, but no picture is available so I'm not sure how that would look compared to the white.
The Beechwood Gate wasn't that hard to install, but then we just screwed it into the doorframe since we removed the actual door to my son's room. After about a week or two the locking mechanism is taking more force to close--I'm not sure if "Grammy" did something when she couldn't open it the other day or if it has something to do with the changing humidity and the expansion/contraction of the wood doorframe. I've just been too lazy to try adjusting the bolts that connect the gate to the pieces on the doorframe. But I really do like this gate. And we like the PlayDen, too.
--Sue B.
SAHM to Evan Jeffrey 03-11-01
We just installed the Safeway gate over Easter weekend. We chose it over the beechwood because our stairway has white banisters with darker wood railings, so the white seemed to blend in better. We haven't actually used it too much yet (baby _just_ started crawling, and isn't allowed out of sight upstairs yet because we haven't finished our other babyproofing!), but it seems pretty simple to operate.
You definitely want a hardware-mounted gate at the top of the stairs. At first, I didn't really want to make all those holes, but I decided that it's much easier to patch a couple of drill holes later than to patch a toddler who was able to knock down a pressure-mounted gate at the top of the stairway.