Gate Upgrade

One of the things you have to do when you have kids is danger proof your home as best you can.  We have a staircase in the center of our home that isn't the most baby friendly piece of architecture, so it needs a gate to keep the kid from making an ascent.

Most of the gates you can get now are based on an expansion concept.  The gate presses out against each end to provide resistance to pushing the gate out of the way.  This is great for a door opening or someplace along a hallway (we have a couple other gates installed in those situations) but are not so great for a staircase where one or the other end of the gate is relying on a freestanding newel post.  In that situation pushing out on the support just pushes the structure outward.  You probably can rig the thing with enough oomph to hold in place, but the fact of the matter is in doing so you are slowly but surely damaging the stair railing.

So for that scenario you need to find some other kind of gate.  In the Gib5on iteration of this solution I managed to find a kind of accordion type gate and MacGyver a mount for it.  You can kind of see what is going on here:

In order to mount this I cut two pieces of 1x2 and drilled them the long way to accept zipties (you can barely see one of those pretty much at the end of his nose).  The 1x2 was soft mounted to the structure so as not to damage it and then the included mounting hardware was hardmounted to the 1x2.

This worked reasonably enough and so now in the Sabian iteration of the project I went looking for the gate and the stupid hardware I'd made last time.  Search as I might I couldn't find it.  I eventually came to the conclusion that it must have been in the garage last spring when we had a little bit of a sewer backup and consequently must have gotten some ick on it - and therefore went into the dumpster.  So much for that.

We needed a replacement.  I went to the home center looking for the identical gate so as to repeat the earlier installation.  If you know anything about home centers you will not be surprised to know that I was unsuccessful.  They didn't have this gate (I bet I could have found one at Target or something.  It is a fairly common piece of gear).

They did have this:

This, lo and behold, is a gate designed exactly for the installation circumstances I was just explaining - bearing on the newel post of a staircase.  They have designed and manufactured the adapter hardware I had bush-fixed myself in the earlier round.  Instead of drilled out 1x2 there is a steel adapter piece that mounts to the newel post with adhesive and straps.  The straps are somewhat more formidable than the zipties I had used, and the fastener actually includes a ratchet mechanism; making it simpler to tension the belt (which was an annoying part of using zipties).

Here's the installation in place here:

The straps are also preferable over zipties because the buckle has a release capability, so when you install them backward such that the extra is in front you can take them off without damaging them and turn it around so the installation is cleaner.

I went back and forth over the adhesive.  It probably isn't necessary for proper function but I put it in anyway.  I'm hoping at the end I can get it removed without damaging the finish on the newel.  We'll see - in like three years.

The gate is oak.  The architecture is maple.  You can't have everything I guess.  It doesn't look too out of place, and even wrong it is way more spiffy than the raw pine of the Gib5on installation.

We'll see how it holds up.