Fireplace Gate – Raising A Baby Gate

Fireplace gate DIY project that raises a store-bought baby gate to accommodate taller kids. A tutorial on raising a baby gate for fireplace safety.

Have you all met my husband, Captain Safety Pants? Don’t you dare defend him and say he is so cautious because he is a firefighter. This fear he has that everything and everyone are out to get us, has been going on since way before his fire days. It’s his jam and nobody out safeties Troy. Don’t even try.

We have had a baby gate – termed Fort Knox – up around the woodstove since it came into the house. Troy also added hardware cloth leftover from our chicken coop to the gate just for good measure. And damn if Bennett hadn’t gone and grown since March. Little punk can reach over the gate and touch the side and top of the stove. As Troy gnashed his teeth around how to fix this, I simply offered the advice “he’s only going to touch it once”.

It didn’t go over well.

In hindsight, we probably could have built our own fireplace gate from the start last spring. We could have customized it, made it as tall as we wanted (up to the ceiling if Troy had his say), and spent less on it. But, we didn’t and now we were left to improve what we had.

We looked and schemed about ideas for over a week. We thought about buying bed lifters to raise it up. Too ugly and kind of expensive. I found an idea on Pinterest for raising the gate to prevent little hands from scaling the Super Max. And it was off to the hardware store for us.

“We” ended up buying/using:

• Two pieces of cedar 1×2 lumber strip
• Spray paint (we have loads of spray paint, but a surprising lack of black paint)
• 1×3 lumber strip
• black drywall screws
• Storebought baby gate

Step One
Spray paint all the lumber black. Let it dry.

Step Two
Determine how high you want to raise the fireplace gate. Cut the cedar into blocks that height. Spray paint the ends where you made the cuts. Let it dry.

Step Three
Using drywall screws, attach the cedar to the pivot points of the fireplace gate.

Step Four
Measure, cut, and attach the 1×3 strips to the cedar blocks on long edges of the fireplace gate. Center the strips to prevent access from underneath the gate. I told Troy this step was unnecessary because our kid has such a big head there is no way he could fit under the fireplace gate. He was not convinced.

Step Five
Measure, cut, and attach the 1×3 strips to the front of the fireplace gate, offsetting the height of the strips on the side.

Step Six
Sit on the couch to distract the toddler with videoes of himself on your phone while someone else attaches the fireplace gate to the wall using drywall screws.

From start to finish, this project only took about two hours. The longest part was in regards to the drying time of the spray paint. For a mere $13, we were able to upgrade an existing fireplace gate

We’re now totally set. Unless of course, the toddler decides to learn to pole vault.