A couple of weeks ago, I let you guys know about some of the stylish baby proofing options I had come across and was trying to implement in our new place. We have two sets of stairs (one going up to the 3rd floor and one going down to the basement), and because of our railings and large banisters, the pressure gates weren’t fitting or staying put.
So I found a tutorial for a DIY baby gate from an old door { see here } and decided to give it a try. This project came with several hiccups, and although it was completed, I’m not 100% happy with the quality. In fact, I felt very defeated in my DIY venture. Let me explain…
2 DIY baby gates from 1 $30 door
In the original tutorial I found, they used an old door that I can only assume was 100% wood. Well, I didn’t have nor could I find an old door (although I came across one at a flea market just a few days after starting this project… boo), so I decided to just purchase a cheap one from Home Depot for $30. I thought this was pretty cost efficient since we’d by cutting it in half to make 2 gates.
I anticipated this might be an issue because I was pretty sure that the door was hollow, but I figured I would just roll with it and figure it out as I went. Well, sure enough as my husband cut the door we discovered that it was hollow on the inside (save for about 5″ of solid wood on either side), which left both my top and bottom edges of each gate now open. Being a novice, I headed to Home Depot to ask for help. I don’t think I found the most knowledgable associate, but he suggested that I buy a piece of thin trim, cut it down to size (they didn’t sell any small enough in width) and glue it inside the open portion of the door to close it off.
We decided to try it, but our cuts weren’t very precise because all we own is a big circular saw. In any event, we forged ahead… my husband glued the pieces inside the hollow portion of the door (only on the top edge; we left the bottom open since it would be sitting against the ground and no one would see it). Then I used spackle to fill in the edges where the trim didn’t touch the sides of the door and to try and even out the top on one of the gates (the trim got glued a little too far down and wasn’t flush with the top edge of the door). This gave me several problems, because my spackle kept cracking and needed to be redone SEVERAL times. I finally gave up and just went with what I had, knowing it wasn’t going to be a perfect looking top edge.
In hindsight, I wish I would have just bought a piece of trim the right size and glued or nailed it on top of the open portion of the door instead of trying to fit trim inside the space. The reason I didn’t do this is because the height needed to be very specific because of how low our banister sits, and I had already cut the doors to the right measurement so adding more in inches would have been a problem.
Anyway, once I had the doors prepped, I painted them red (3 coats of Behr Ruby Ring S-G-150). I also attached a cheap door handle from Home Depot in black. Then came the hanging…
Because we rent, I didn’t want to drill into our railings. So, I used a trick I found online of attaching trim to the banister with zip ties. This actually worked really well. I drilled into the trim to attach the hinges. Another piece of trim was attached to the opposite wall for the hook latch. The process of hanging had to be very exact because the door couldn’t drag on the ground, but also couldn’t hit the banister or it wouldn’t open/close. I made some mistakes along the way, but finally got it all up in a manner that works.
I was a sweaty mess when all was said and done, but I couldn’t be happier when these dumb gates were finally up! (by the way, I say “I” because my husband bowed out somewhere around the speckling debacle).
Luckily in the end, I like how they look and they work perfectly at keeping Lincoln off the stairs. Mia is tall enough to reach over and unlatch them, so she can still go up and down the stairs when she needs to without help.
My only concern is with their stability. Lincoln has already taken paint off the top of one because it is as the perfect height for his little mouth and his teeth found the top. He only did it once, so I’m hoping it won’t happen again. But I am contemplating putting crib teething guards on the top edges of the gates just in case.
I am also concerned about Mia hanging on them and bending the hinges or (worse yet) pulling them out of the wall. She’s a bit of a monkey.
Next time (if there is a next time), I will most likely fashion my own doors from solid wood like this one (of course I found this only AFTER I had already started my project – that will teach me to do more research).
We also found an alternative to my original idea of how to babyproof the railing spacing… more on that later this week, but here’s a preview:
