Babyproofing an apartment or rental: what sticks, what presses, and the two screws worth asking for

What is truly no-drill

Doorways. A pressure gate with its wall cups attached using removable adhesive strips; check the tension weekly. Regalo's certified Easy Step includes the cups. Ranked in best pressure-mounted baby gates. Cabinets. Slide locks on paired handles, adhesive magnetic locks on wood doors, adhesive straps on appliances and the trash, with a 24-hour cure. The whole method is babyproof cabinets without drilling. Outlets. Check for the TR mark; sliding plates swap in with the existing plate screw, and inserts need nothing. Corners and edges. Adhesive, chosen for clean removal; foam on your furniture, thinner clear guards on the landlord's. Cords and blinds. Shorten, route, cut the loops, wind-ups on the frame. Doors. Knob covers clip on; lever locks are adhesive. Stairs with a post on each side. A banister adapter zip-ties to the posts and the gate screws into the adapter, not the building, per baby gates for stairs without drilling.

What needs the landlord

Two things, and they are the two with the injury data. Furniture anchors need a screw into a stud at the wall end; adhesive alone tears the drywall paper when a dresser tips, and the CPSC counted 217 tip-over deaths from 2013 to mid-2023. A top-of-stairs gate with a wall on one side needs its bracket screwed into that wall; a pressure gate there is out regardless. Both are two to four small screws into a stud, patched with spackle at move-out. Ask in writing, cite the CPSC, promise the patch. The script and the fallback are in anchoring furniture in a rental. If the answer is genuinely no, the adhesive TV strap (QuakeHOLD! rates its 4520 to 70 inches and 150 pounds) is the honest fallback for the TV, and low wide dressers with locked drawers are the fallback for the bedroom; neither equals an anchor.

Windows, and the cities that require guards

Some cities require landlords to install window guards in apartments where young children live; New York City's rule is the best known, covering children under 10 in buildings of three or more units. Check your city's housing code, and ask the landlord in writing either way; a guard is their install, and a guard that states ASTM F2090 with an emergency release is the one to ask for. Where no law applies, a Velcro window stop set to 4 inches is the no-drill answer for hung and sliding windows, and the CPSC's furniture-away-from-windows rule costs nothing. The windows in full are in how to childproof windows.

Move-out

Adhesive comes off with a hair dryer, dental floss behind the pad, and a citrus remover on the residue. Screw holes fill with lightweight spackle and a dab of paint in a minute each. Pressure-gate cups leave their adhesive strips, which peel. Do a test removal on one lock inside a cabinet the week you move in, so you know what the finish does. Everything else on the list goes to the next apartment, which is the quiet advantage of babyproofing without a drill. The whole house in order is the babyproofing checklist.

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