So I’m not joking when I say that we spent a small fortune trying to find the right baby gates for our stairs. I bought almost every trial gate online, which then meant we had to return it via UPS or FedEx and eat the shipping cost. Nothing at Target, Buy Buy Baby, or anywhere else was quite working for our new (beautiful but difficult) staircase. I hope this post about baby gates for difficult stairs helps you solve your baby safety problems!
We didn’t want to drill any holes into our walls, so we used all spring-loaded gates for both the up and downstairs.

To protect the walls from damage, we bought these guys: Baby Gate Guru Pressure Mounted Wall Protector.

We have this gate for the downstairs portion of the stairs. It’s auto-locking, extremely secure, and easy to install and adjust. Many a kid has hung onto this bad boy, and he hasn’t budged a bit!

The auto-lock feature is wonderful when you’ve got your hands full coming up or going down the stairs!

On one side, we have an uneven surface because of the “baseboard” and the wall. On the other side, we have a tapered pillar surrounded by wrought iron. It was almost the end of my sanity trying to make this work. In the end, we found the things listed below that worked for us!

In order to use the spring-loaded gate on the banister, we had to order these little accessories. This is how we were able to safely secure the gate without ruining the banister.

We didn’t use the wooden pieces pictured, but the plastic pieces have done the job just fine!


You can adjust them based on the width of your banister, which for us, was thinner at the top and wider at the bottom.


We also needed to extend the gate to get it past the wrought iron, so we bought this extension.

We wanted to be able to have a solid place to put our foot on the bottom step, so we had to angle the gate in order to get this space. It doesn’t look the best, but it works just fine and dandy, thank you.

We went with this little number for our upstairs gate. You can adjust the springs to fit so it worked with our baseboards and our pillar. Jon adjusted the springs perfectly (I tried to do it myself, and that didn’t work out so well), so I don’t worry at all when Corey goes and shakes on the gate like a monkey in a cage. It’s super secure! It is NOT auto-closing like our downstairs gate, however, so you do have to make sure you lock it in.

We’ve had to remove this gate a few times for construction or moving purposes, and it goes back on perfectly. There’s been no damage to our walls or baseboard either!


I hope all of our struggles help you with your baby gates for difficult stairs! These products have worked well for us for a long time now (over 4 years)!

Ill one up you! We have ONLY bannisters to connect our gate to! But Chase made one and we have it all connected with zip ties on the banisters!:)
I need his handyman skills around here! I love the zip tie idea – genius!!
What a great solution for getting the gate at the bottom of your stairs to “attach” to the banister! You were not only creative and forward-thinking, but those are such attachments for the banister. It all really looks so nice!
Banisters are always the trickiest to handle.. We had these stairs in our old house and it was a nightmare putting a baby gate over there. Really liked the way you came up with the zip tie idea…and most of all it didn’t affect the look and feel at all.