I just moved into a rental townhouse, and I love it except for one thing- I can’t figure out how to secure a baby gate at the top of this flight of stairs. Left view, right view, front view. I don’t really mind drilling into walls, but I’d rather not drill into the bannister posts or rails. Have any of you baby gated a similar stairway?
For those who haven’t, gates at the tops of stairs need to be hardware mounted, not pressure mounted.
We didn’t want to drill into the banisters either, and no one had told us the gate couldn’t be pressure-mounted, so we got a pressure-mounted one and some Y spindles.
You can buy one of those flexible baby fences and corral the whole area.
We had our own banister problems. My solution for that was getting a piece of 1x3 and cutting it to the proper length. I then routed a couple notches near the top and bottom of the board. The board was then zip tied to the banister with heavy duty zip ties and tightened down real good. I then mounted the gate to the board.
My husband did a similar thing as Baracus - mounted a piece of wood to the banister and then screwed the gate into that. We had a double staircase that met on one landing and then became single. Obviously, we needed a fixed-mount gate at the top, but we used a pressure mount gate at the bottom of one of the staircases and a mounted walk-thru gate at the bottom of the other.
Looking at your pics, keep in mind that you could mount the gate a step or two lower and mount it to the walls instead of using the banister. Also, there was a time that we felt we no longer needed the mounted gate at the top of the stairs, but still didn’t want our child to be able to wander downstairs during the night and she had to pass the stairway to get to our room. We ended up putting a pressure walk-thru gate across her bedroom instead. We continued to have a monitor and would hear if she got up, but felt better knowing she couldn’t go downstairs half-asleep.
That’s exactly what I thought of when I saw this post this morning but I couldn’t think of a good way to explain it.
The only thing I’d add is to use those 3 foot(ish) zip ties. Only because they’re more ‘heavy duty’ than then the smaller ones. Though I’ve been having bad luck, lately with the ones from Home Depot, so maybe another brand.
Regarding corralling the entire area, I like that idea as well, but you have to be careful with an unweildly gate that you don’t want to move. It’s tempting to step over it, which is fine, but stepping over it as you’re heading down the stairs is a mistake you’ll only make once. That first step is a doozy. Make sure it’s far enough away from the steps that you can walk over it and not have your foot land on the first stair.