Kitchen Gate
We call it the kitchen gate but it is really a glorified baby and child gate that happens to be in the walkway to the kitchen. It has many purposes. Sometimes to keep bodies in and some times to keep them out. Or both when certain bodies need some distance from one another. It helps keeps people out if (not that this ever happens) the floor is so messy I don’t want feet and blankets and toys dragging through it until it gets cleaned up. It keep messy post-dinner toddlers contained until they can be cleaned up. It helps keep snitching fingers out of the cheese or sour cream or noodles until it is actually time to eat and people might possibly use utensils. It is a magical door and what’s even more magical is that it looks cute while in use and then slides easily out of the way when not in use.
Somebody wasn’t a fan when the gate made its debut
This set up was obviously custom for our floor plan but could be customized to a variety of spaces. Mike rigged it so that it can swing around. This is important because it isn’t a straight doorway. It needed to be able to be tucked behind a wall when not in use and then needed to connect at an angle when gating the walkway. In fact it can swing around enough to block another walkway as well which is useful if, say, you have a worldwide pandemic and are suddenly doing online school for 3 kids and still have 2 small ones that don’t understand why they can’t push all the buttons.
The swing-and-attach-at-an-angle factor is probably the most unique thing about this gate. Here are some close ups of the mechanism that he rigged up to make that happen.
He did have to custom make some of these parts but you can at least get an idea of what he did so that you can recreate it for your needs. We also placed some felt pads on the feet so they’d be quiet and not scratch the wood floor.
If you are wondering what the white thing is on the hook. We found very quickly that the toddler could figure her way past the simple hook so Mike used his one of his favorite materials: Polymorph. It is moldable to whatever shape you need. So it slides to lock the hook. On a side note, he has since gotten color pellets for the polymorph so we could make it black but we’ve never gotten around to changing it. So you could use polymorph or just learn from our experience get a hook set up that has a slider if you are need to contain beings with at least toddler human intelligence and dexterity.
