I painted my living room today and when I posted the pictures someone asked me what I had around my fireplace. My recent love affair with Pinterest had me thinking that maybe I should write a quick post and pin it since it might be the last thing I ever do in my house that did not come directly from a Pin posted by someone else.
As soon as Lucy started rolling over she started rolling towards the brick hearth. It was as if she was a planet and the bricks were the sun, she’d roll around and around getting closer to the bricks and I would speculate as to when she might actually hit them.
I think Lucy is likely to roll in to the bricks before any of the planets collide with the sun, certainly before December 21st of this year anyway. This is good because I don’t think I can do anything about the end of civilization with four bucks.
How to Baby Proof your Hearth with Four Bucks
- Buy four pool noodles at the dollar store.
- Cut them to an appropriate length so that you can wrap them around your hearth. My hearth is short, it is only two pool noodles tall. Incidentally, my heart is exactly the length of one pool noodle plus two noodle pieces. (I should fix that typo, but my heart can also be measured in pool noodles.) I’d suggest piling the noodles around your hearth until you can figure out the way to wrap it with the fewest cuts.
- Glue your noodles together with Gorilla Glue.
- Tape them together while they dry.
- Realize that you could have just taped them in the first place. Elect to just leave the tape on.
- Cover your hearth and your pool noodles with a quilt.
Now you can let your baby roll like a wild child. Or like the Earth hurtling towards the Sun. Up to you.
Excitement on the side 
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What about when you actually use the wood stove – don’t the noodles, tape, and quilt get too hot? Our stove gets to 400-700F!
Ahhh… our fireplace is gas so the front glass piece gets crazy hot. We never used it when our teeny was little. If I needed it to heat the house I’d have definitely put a gate up or something!
How did the pool noodles stick to the hearth.? Did you glue that as well?
Love the idea! I modified it a bit with adding fabric and insulation board on the top. Thanks!
How did you keep the quilt down? I feel my little guy will rip it off the hearth.
This is the best idea ever, thank you for posting! I have been looking all over online and was going to just have to by a custom made fireplace proofer and then found this. It’s very cost effective, im doing it today!
Awesome! Glad you found it. One word of warning – the littles are crafty once they start crawling and mine was frequently removed until I got some heavy duty tape and went to town. I had no trouble taping my pool noodles to my brick fireplace, covering the whole things with a quilt and then it was more stable!