Post by aydee on Feb 10, 2015 22:30:05 GMT -5
Has anybody taken down the safety gates by your stairs already? How are your LOs handling it?
My parents were visiting this weekend and managed to break the gate at the bottom of our stairs. Thanks mom. It is nearly an impossible fix, as one part of the gate was ripped out of the plaster wall, and the wall then crumbled around it. It was tough to install in the first place, and required a professional coming out and drilling into the brick exterior wall and then driving anchors in as well as other screws to secure it.
I'm pretty sure the only option we have is to move the gate up one stair and pay someone to repeat the same installation process, since we don't have the tools or expertise to tackle this ourselves. We would still be left with a big hole from the first install that would need to be repaired, and then we would have to paint our entire stairway and upstairs hall, since we don't have original paint for the wall. We can't do the painting ourselves because it would require somehow rigging a ladder to paint a tricky area high up near the top of the stairwell that can't be reached in any normal way.
The gate has been down since yesterday and we've talked to the kids repeatedly about not being allowed to use the stairs without one of us with them. So far so good. Nobody has tried to go up the stairs. It just makes me nervous though, especially if I'm busy in the kitchen or bathroom and can't see the stairs to make sure that the kids aren't on them. Should we go through the hassle and expense of putting the gate back up now? We'll probably have to do it at some point once baby #3 arrives and can start trying to climb the stairs. But then again maybe it won't be practical to have gates up when I also have preschoolers. Any thoughts on this from STMs?