Different Take on Toddler-Proof Doorknob

In my ongoing attempts to stay ahead of Lincoln's ability to do himself harm, I have secured the door to my shop with a new, higher doorknob.

Now simply shutting the door renders it toddler-proof.

Lincoln was super-excited about me drilling holes in the door, right up until I removed the old doorknob and he understood what was actually going on. Then there were tears.

New Shelving Unit in Family Room

We picked up an old, used IKEA shelf from a family a couple neighborhoods away who were moving house. Got it for $13 *with* delivery. It's definitely seen better days, but for $13 we can use it for a year or two and then upgrade once stuff higher on the priority list has been taken care of.

This enabled us to finally unpack the last two cardboard boxes (well, there might be one or two cardboard boxes in the basement, but we won't mention those).

Before:

Now:

The shelf is anchored to a wall stud, so now all the toddlers that live in or visit our house can use this new climbing wall secure in the knowledge that it won't tip over on top of them.

Wall-mounting the TV

I have been working on baby-proofing the house for a while now, being comfortable in the knowledge that Link will not be crawling for a number of months yet.

I came to an unpleasant realization this week: there is already a toddler spending a lot of time in our house. Our nanny brings her two-year-old son to our house while she watches Link. Our 10-month-old nephew Torsten has also begun crawling and pulling himself up on furniture. So I skipped right past "running out of time" to "over-due" on getting things baby-proofed.

Probably the most dangerous (to toddlers) item in the house was the un-anchored TV in the basement. While it is fairly stable and would be difficult to knock over, the consequences of a 65-pound flat panel TV falling on a little kid made it the biggest risk in the house (that I can think of).

I ordered a locking wall-mount kit compatible with our TV the same night I realized this oversight (the nanny was off this past week).

Here is what the old TV setup looked like:

Today, I installed the wall-mount kit and hung the TV!

Any kid that wants to move that TV is going to need a lot of persistence and a long screwdriver.

I moved the TV to the far end of the basement because Brianna and I are thinking of installing a screen and projector there sometime later this year. This allows us to get the TV safely mounted, and to try out a different arrangement of the basement.

Of course, since I was moving things around in the basement, I organized the rest of it as well:

It's a much more open rumpus room now!