My stair gate hell

My stair gate hell

Even if I do say so myself, I am practically minded and can handle the majority of DIY tasks. With stair gates, however, I met my match. I don’t have a good track record with stair gates at all. In my opinion they are a necessary evil and an absolute pain to install. 

When Helen learnt to crawl, we installed a Mothercare stair gate across the living room door frame. We used to refer to the room as baby jail as it was the one place we could keep Helen confined and safe. It wasn’t long until the handle broke rendering the stair gate useless.

A couple of months later we moved house. By now Helen was walking and fitting stair gates was at the top of my “to do” list. This is when I made an irritating mistake.

I was in Ikea buying some furniture when I saw they produced their own range of stair gates. They were a colour that matched our banisters and were cheap. “Brilliant,” I thought, “no need to waste time going to Mothercare.”

I bought two sets, took them home and busily started constructing one of them. I began to get very nervous when I realised that, in true Ikea-style, I had to build the entire gate, including the hinges. The components looked very fiddly and might as well have come from the inside of a Kinder Egg.

I eventually got one of the gates fixed to the wall. The hinges, however, kept falling apart making the gates utterly useless. No matter what I did, I couldn’t get this stair gate to open and close properly and after about two hours I had a major sense of humour failure.

At this point in time we had a builder’s skip in the driveway outside our house. Unable to take any more, I pulled the stair gate off the wall, marched out the house and hurled the gate straight into the skip. The second gate, which was still in its wrapper, was returned and exchanged for a refund.

I’ll sum the experience up in three words; cheap Ikea crap.

Having given up on Ikea, I returned to Mothercare. This time I spent considerably more money on the assumption that cheap stair gates are a false economy.

This time I bought two sets of stair gates and fitted them both – one at the top of the stairs and one at the bottom. It took a while and was a pain, but I got them in place. Unfortunately the fixings proving insubstantial and both sets of gates fell out the wall after just a few weeks.

I gave up and admitted defeat. In a humiliating and emasculating move I got Roger, our builder, to install the gates.

Having sought professional help you might imagine this story has a happy ending. Unfortunately it’s not to be. You see there’s a small gap underneath the stair gate at the top of the stairs (not Roger’s fault, there’s an obstruction he had to work around). It had crossed my mind that Helen might, at some point in the future, attempt to squeeze through it, something that, by rights, shouldn’t be easy for her to achieve at all.  

The very next morning after Roger had fitted the gates, Anna was getting Helen ready for nursery. They were both on the landing and the stair gate was firmly closed. Anna turned her back for a couple of seconds to grab some clothes. When she turned back again, Helen was stood on the opposite side of the stair gate at the very top of the stairs, a big smile on her face celebrating the fact she’d managed to slip underneath!

The stair gate had barely been in place for 12 hours and she’d already beaten it. Needless to say, I shall now have to spend some time modifying the thing so that she can’t get underneath it.

In the meantime, I have a simple message for manufactures of stair gates everywhere; make your products easy to install.