We have a crawler, and she’s getting fast! Polly is 8 months old now and I actually feel like she might be running before too long. The girl loves to move. She takes after our oldest in that respect. Greta (8) was a mover and an adventurer as a baby. She started climbing out of her crib before she could walk. And just as she was figuring it all out, we bought our first house with 3 sets of stairs! I thought I was going to have a panic attack trying to keep her safe, while simultaneously counting how many baby gates we’d need. And then someone told me, she’ll catch on quick. Just work with her. Slide her down all the stairs and then let her crawl back up. And then slide her back down (on her belly). Before long, Greta had mastered the stairs as a baby.
Our second, Faye (3), has always been a little more timid. She was curious about stairs but not the kind of child that would enjoy sliding down the stairs just to crawl back up over and over. Maybe once or twice before she would have just preferred to stay at the bottom. Haha. Our solution back in 2014, was to DIY our own baby gate!
It was made of thick plexiglass and wood, was minimal and served us well! You can find the full tutorial right here.
Since then, we got a new, metal stair railing (more on that here), and although we held onto our DIY’d baby gate, we pulled it out and learned it’s not going to work with the new railing. So now we’re left with–To gate or not to gate, once again. What do you do in your house?
If we do end up gating the stairs, I rounded up 18 stylish options I’m considering below! They’ve come so far in even the 3 years since I last looked! I can barely believe it! How cool is #2? 14 is nice and discreet. There are some really nice options on Etsy, now, too! Or, as always, the DIY route is a possibility for us, too. 
1. | 2. | 3. | 4. | 5. | 6. | 7. | 8. | 9. | 10. | 11. | 12. | 13. | 14. | 15. | 16. | 17. | 18.
Do you have any thoughts on installing a gate on exposed brick without ruining the wall?
Unfortunately, not really (that I know of). If it’s a brick pillar you can wrap rope or something around and tie a board to it, but if it’s a wall, the only options would be to use liquid nails (which would be a bear to remove after) or drill into the mortar lines instead of the brick itself, and try to patch it once you remove the gate. But you can get issues with bricks shifting out of place when messing with mortar, so it’s a tricky one.
I’m trying to click on the link for the tutorial to make the Plexiglas gate and it takes me to a bed on Wayfair.com
By the time we were on kid 3 we gave up and didn’t bother with any extras. :-)
..no gates, monitors, outlet covers, corner pads, clothe diapers….
We had one of those stylish baby gates with our 3 older girls. When our fourth girl came along 7 years later we were faced with the debate. We are still debating it now that she is two and a half! Haha! I guess no baby gate won out. This go around we moved into a new house with a different set up that meant no real good options. Lucky for us our fourth girl seems to handle the stairs well and was happy to not go up and down the stairs unless we were with her. We did use a tension gate upstairs to keep her in whatever bedroom we happened to be in or to block part of the hallway off to keep her in a section of the upstairs. Eh. Sounds bad like a pet situation… it worked though!
Would it be possible to have the railing company you used manufacture a gate that coordinated? That would be seamless, and you could customize it however you wanted. Not sure it would be worth the expense though.
Ooo! That’s an idea!