You don't want your house to look like a prison but you need to avoid your toddlers from crawling up the stairs.... A children's gate which is pleasing to the eye, functional, strong, a toy and doesn't leave scars once removed... Sounds impossible? Maybe not: Let's make a huge abacus!
If the stairs take up a prominent space in your house, do you really want to protect them with the most boring and ugly thing that you can find on the market? And this during quite a few years while your kids go through the first years of their lives?
You don't really want to install such a gate but you have no choice so maybe you can try to make it blend in. But making such a huge gate blend in is quite hard. So why not turn it into something playful and make it stand out? Hence came the idea of making a huge abacus.
Dimensions and material choice:
The dimensions of the gate are dictated by the dimensions of the stairs. It is 120cm wide and with a height of about 80cm it is just as high as the newel post. (Commercially available gates are about 75 to 80cm high. This one, as it is mounted on top of the second thread, has an actual height, for a toddler standing on the first thread, of about 100cm.)
The frame of the gate is made from solid wooden boards, 5x2cm for the top and bottom and 7x2cm for the sides. I wanted to have them as big as possible to make the gate as strong as possible but still keep it aesthetically overall pleasing.
After some testing I considered that 6mm aluminium rods together with a supporting wooden slat (3x2cm) in the middle would be the best solution strength wise and probably also the most visually pleasing.
For the beads I went looking for some colored wooden lacing beads. There are about 100 of them on the gate. I chose a set with rather straightforward shapes as not to overstimulate visually. The beads are about 2,5cm big, they could have been a little bigger but when ordering online the dimensions of the beads aren't always given, so hard to check... It is also good to verify prior to ordering what is the diameter of the hole in the beads. But with 6mm rods and sufficiently big beads, you should be safe.
Assembly method:
To assemble the boards I was considering an overlap joint but I decided to make it a little easier and used a but joint and some dowels.
There are two possibilities to assemble the boards. The first is to have the top and bottom bars between the stiles (left on drawing) and the second is to place the stiles between the top and bottom bars (right on drawing). I consider the right solution to be the stronger one because the dowels will resist better to a shear force whereas in the left solution any downward force on the gate would just pull the glued dowel connection apart. Secondly, because of the dimensions of the boards, the glued surface is bigger in the right solution.
While gluing I paid special attention to make sure that the gate was square.
I used 2 hinges to mount the gate to a wooden profile of 4x3cm in which I had already drilled 4 countersunk holes to fix it to the wall.
Once all the assembly was done I gave it a coat of clear finish.
What about the shutting post?
For the shutting post and lock of the gate I didn't really want to screw anything in the newel post and damage it permanently so I came up with a solution where I clamp a wooden 4x3cm profile against the handrails with 3 long flathead bolts and a smaller board. I drilled sufficiently deep countersink holes in the shutting post so the bolts would not have to stick out. I also took a sufficiently large diameter so I could fit in a socket wrench to tighten the nuts.
To lock the gate I added a magnet on the bottom so it would close by itself and on the top I added a simple sliding lock. The kids had this lock figured out once they got a little older but by that time the gate wasn't really necessary anymore.
A strong baby gate!
The horizontal rods seem to make for a good climbing wall for the kids but in reality, the kids rarely tried to climb on them. I think that because the rods are rather thin, they are rather harsh on the hands when trying to hold on to them.
The gate is surely strong enough. More than once the kids stood (2x15kg) on the bottom bar and it didn't make a sound.
I was happy with the result until, surprisingly, I found my daughter on the other side of the gate a few days later. Seems she had found a little back door behind the newel post under the guard rails. I added a short horizontal beam and she was permanently locked out :-).
Back to normal with minimal scars:
When removing the gate, only 4 small holes remain in the wall. With some plaster they can be easily touched up and next time when the wall will be painted, they will simply be painted over. The newel post bares no traces once the gate is removed as the stop was clamped on the guard rails and not screwed.
The kids surely loved this gate. Quite often they could be seen playing with the beads. Now that is removed, nothing reminds of it being there. Because it is so strong it will go on to be used in many more houses and it will bring joy to many more kids.