How To Install Baby Gate Without Drilling Into Wall

See a video here: http://youtu.be/TQGxbHndFKc

If you lot like posts similar this, cheque out my new She Fixes weblog at shefixes.blogspot.com. Lots of tutorials on the things that I love… fixing stuff and tips and tricks that take worked well for the states around the house. :)

UPDATE: Our twins are almost 4 years old, and this gate is still going strong (and with the add-on of a third child as well). Then, this has stood the test of time... or at to the lowest degree the examination of iii years.

Now that our twins are itch, we accept become past due to install our infant gates. Over the past week, we finally decided to go for information technology. So here is a picayune tutorial on how nosotros did this without drilling into our banisters. You can purchase kits to do this, only they're pretty expensive and unnecessary, in my opinion. This is an easy do-information technology-yourself solution.

Kickoff of all, some information on our gates. We got some groovy gates from our friends who no longer needed them - Evenflo Height of Stair gate. I like the way the latch works, and you tin can open and close it with ane paw and information technology is about silent (which is great for sleeping babies). They are also completely removable (in that you can detach the gate from the hinges and put it away if you don't need information technology for some period of time). This is useful for usa, because the babies can't climb the stairs yet. Once they learn to climb the steps, nosotros can just pop the gate on, and we're fix to go.

The bottom of our stairs originally looked like this:

We have a banister on either side with a very irregularly shaped lesser department (lots of different thicknesses of wood meeting). I really didn't want to drill into the banister. Even though you could fill the holes someday with woods putty, you would definitely be able to run across where the gate had been. So we decided to go for a heavy duty cypher tie solution.

We went to Lowe'south and purchased a ii x 4 and heavy duty zip ties. These are the zip ties that we bought:

They are 2 anxiety long, and they are rated for 175 pounds each. I figure with 4 of these securing each of our 2x4s, surely the babies will non be able to pull these off (unless they tin pull with 700 lbs of force). Miles is strong, but he's not that strong.

We cut the 2x4 into to pieces that are about the same summit as the widest section of the banister. Here is what they looked like in the raw wood form:

Notice the cat, who is not excited well-nigh an additional barrier to escaping upward the stairs.

Groovy, simply I know that these will be upwards for quite a while, so I decided to paint them white. After a couple coats of white semi-gloss, they looked much meliorate.

Nosotros attached the boards to the banisters using 4 nothing ties on each of them (2 at the meridian and two at the lesser). We pulled these ties very tight. It's imperative that these ties be as tight as yous tin become them then that the 2x4 pieces tin't move.

Then, Jason installed the brackets direct onto the 2 x 4s.

Vivienne is ensuring that he is installing the gates correctly.

Hither is what the finished product looks like:

It doesn't look bad at all. In fact, I would almost go as far as to say that this looks pretty. =) We didn't have to drill a single concur into our existing structure, and it was an extremely easy task. The entire project toll us less than $ten (for the wood and the nix ties), because we got the gate for gratis (thanks, Eddie and Rhonda!).

And, finally, here is a baby's-eye view.