It's happened, baby is mobile and we have found ourselves in the next stage of baby-proofing the house - The safety gate.

When I started looking at the options for a safety gate I was a bit overwhelmed, there are loads. White, Silver or Wood. Permanent fixing or Pressure fixed. Fully opening or Walk through. Extendable or not. It seemed that I would need to do quite a bit of looking around and checking out other people's opinions.

Well, the practicality became a little simpler when I measured the space for the gate. We have a very old, very wonky cottage which has some narrow doorways and some wide doorways - but few which are the "standard" size. I wanted the gate to block the hallway into the kitchen (our stairs lead up from the kitchen) and this door is quite narrow. This reduced my options to a few gates which will fit 68cm.

I also particularly wanted a wooden one as this fits in with our decor better (just because my home is a mess of toys, changing supplies and other baby garb doesn't mean I can't pretend still to have a stylish house!)

I found this gate on Amazon for £25 with free delivery in 3-5 days. It was on John Lewis and various other sites for a few pounds more.

**Why I would recommend this gate.

Style - It's a good looking gate, mainly wooden but with silver catches which look decent quality.

Ease of use - you can open it quickly and easily with one hand. If you want to remove for a period of time it can just be lifted off it's hinges,

Extendable - There are two halves which are screwed together at different intervals dependent on what width you want. It can go from 62 - 102cm, which means that when we move home, it can still be used even if we have different sized areas..

No floor bar - Some of the gates I looked at had base bars which I'm pretty sure my husband would have tripped over (not me, obviously).

Wide walkway - as I had a narrow space I needed a gate that would fully open (not just a section in the middle which opens).

Ease of installation - it's pretty easy to put up, the instructions say it shouldn't take more than 15 mins. It did take me longer (see below) but wasn't too bad.

**Any downsides?

The only down side for me was that the installation was a bit trickier than the instructions would have me believe. If you have a reasonably straight, correctly angled space, it's easy, but my wonky old cottage made aligning the clasps a bit more difficult.

However, it wasn't impossible and I had it up and working in about 45 minutes. You'll need a drill and screwdriver to fix it in place.

Overall, I'm very pleased with my gate, it does everything I need and was only £25, whereas some gates can cost as much as £70.