Baby proofing our tiny house

Since we knew from the beginning we’d have a toddler when we built the tiny house, we tried to make it as child-friendly as possible. When you have a small space, you can’t just block off part of the house to make it baby-friendly…and spending your whole life saying, “No! Don’t touch that!” is not very fun either. So we tried to design things so we could minimize the amount of “nos” in the house. Here are a few examples:

(above picture- for some reason won’t let me caption it– is of our stairs. They have a removable bottom step, which we will keep removed until Bram is big enough to navigate the steps. Until then, it’s too tall for him to climb up, but not too tall for us. 🙂 

The one “No!” in the house is the stove. It is a gas stove and doesn’t have any kid-proofing ability. So that’s the one thing we come down hard about if he touches. So far he does a good job of staying away from it.

For a while (when he threw my boots and some of his toys in the toilet in the space of three days) we thought about locking off the bathroom. But one of his favorite games is throwing his toys in the bathtub (and the bathroom is a third of our house anyway) so it felt unfair to keep him contained to just the living room/kitchen. So we’ve left him with bathroom access, and since he hasn’t thrown anything else into the toilet, so far so good.

Of course, it’s only been three months– but so far, giving him freedom of the house has worked out. And only having one “No!” (and not too many weird latches, locks, and gates on things) has made our lives simpler.