Its amazing the amount of things that change in two weeks….

My husband, 9 month old son, and I recently got back from our holiday travels to Pennsylvania and Florida. We had a wonderful time visiting family and celebrating together, however when we got back to Kansas City, we quickly realized that we had brought home a totally different kid! He’s the same sweet little guy, but he is now crawling and pulling up on EVERYTHING. I knew that baby proofing the fireplace hearth would be one of the first projects to tackle after getting back.

I immediately went to pinterest and found a whole range of solutions. Some of the nicest I found involved building a whole cushion bench over the hearth! Although that looked wonderful, I didn’t have the time or $ to take on a project like that. I needed a solution and I needed one NOW. I then found a few posts where parents used foam floor mats and I remembered I had a huge stack of them in my basement! Voila! I found my solution.

I had a bunch of these foam floor mats that I had used as my studio floor in my old house.

So during nap time, I went to work!

What you need:

large ruler, foam puzzle tiles, box cutter, cardboard, duck tape

Step 1: Measure the distance from the back of the hearth to the front part of the step. Mine was 16 1/4″. I measured that distance 3 times across one tile, and then used the ruler to make a straight cut. The leftover piece happened to be pretty close to the distance from the step to the floor, so I just used the other piece to cover the front of my step. If yours doesn’t work that way, you could custom cut another tile to fit.

Step 2: Continue to cut and assemble tile pieces to fit your hearth. A good tip is to start on the end of your hearth that is exposed the most, so that your last and smallest piece is at the end, where no one will notice the size difference in you tiles.

Step 3: When I was done covering my hearth. I slid the whole thing off, and reinforced the seams with duck tape.

Step 5: Baby testing.

The entire project took me under an hour and was a quick solution to my problem. I also love that the tiles are easy to clean and easy to remove!

What are your favorite baby proofing solutions?

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