Creating Holes....

Our house came with all of the baby gates already installed and we LOVED that about it.  It meant we didn't have to deal with buying and installing them ourselves.  However, we found that the gate on the main level just didn't function for us! It was installed just off the kitchen to keep kids from going down the back stairs, however it also kept people from the main floor bathroom.  Which meant anytime we had people over they had to ask to use the bathroom because if you don't have kids you have no idea how to open a baby gate.  Plus on top of that our baby gate was a little finicky and involved not only squeezing the lock but a little push and pull to get it to open.  This was driving us nuts. In addition, I have always thought down the line when Norah is out of diapers I can just picture us running her to the bathroom and not being able to get the gate open in time and have MANY accidents in the hallway. This just wouldn't do.   I forgot to take a before picture but this is the best I can do.  This is the gate I'm talking about, the bathroom is beyond the gate to the right and the basement stairs to the left.

The reason they put the gate there was because at the top of the stairs it has to sit on a slight angle to fit... we didn't care, we chose the slight angle over the frustration of always having to open the gate for guests.  Ryan unscrewed the gate to find they had attached it with butterfly clips... needless to say what we thought would be small holes to patch turned into this... a toonie sized hole!!

Luckily patching holes in our house is pretty easy since the plaster is tectured and you can't really do anything wrong because you won't see it anyway. Now we still have to patch the holes but that will be done soon enough (we have tonnes of holes to patch all over the house from where the old owners hung their pictures vs where we have hung ours).  But this is what it looks like now!

 SO MUCH BETTER!!!  Now people can use the bathroom and not be trapped!

Since we are talking about the little lady, here she is a few weeks ago playing with an ant (the little black dot in front of her).  She was fascinated with it!!! She would get down on the ground and watch it! So funny!