How to Childproof your Fireplace

If you have very young children or are about to have very young children you are probably searching for a way to secure your fireplace. You don’t want your kids to get hurt on it and unfortunately the only real suggestion is to get those foam corner protectors or similar product. Those foam things awful from the start and only go downhill from there.

The issues with the corner protectors are:
-They look terrible
-Their longevity is questionable
-Your child could still trip in close proximity to the fireplace and hit their face on the vertical part of the stone or brick bench
-They junk up your room
-You may actually want to continue utilizing your fireplace while child proofing it

What’s a parent to do? Mrs. and I repurposed a brand new super baby gate. I.E. a long baby gate used to partition a room into a fireplace protector.

The downside with this kit is that is does require eight drilled holes to properly secure it. Let’s be honest though. The holes are small, you will probably have the gate up for years (especially if you are going for more than one kid), and drywall is easy to patch. Bonus – when you take it down it’s a good excuse to update your wall color!

We’ve had ours up for over nine years now and it’s worked perfectly. None of our children have had any problems with the fireplace, no one has gotten hurt, and we can still use the fireplace without worrying about someone getting burned.

After all these years it still looks the same as it did the day we put it up.

This is what our room looked like before:

This is what our fireplace looks like with the gate:

As far as cleaning the carpet, we use a regular vacuum right up to the edge and then use a handheld vacuum to periodically clean between the vertical bench of the fireplace and the gate.