Our house is beautiful and intelligently designed, except for this one plaguing flaw. The stairs that lead from the living room to our bedroom are open, leaving a seven or eight foot drop to hardwood (and one small ten foot drop). We had a couch there for a while, but I still found the vertical design never-wracking, especially because Sebastian wakes up first every morning and climbs up to our room while we're sleeping. I think every single morning for the last year, I've been heard half-asleep, "Close to wall! Close to the wall!!" There was also the dramatic fall I had in the winter, which luckily involved slipping down the flight of stairs instead of falling off the edge. There was a lot of blood and I went into shock, and am still waiting for little pieces of glass to grow out of my hand. Of course I've imagined similar fates for Sebastian. Our landlords are hands-off and don't seem to think there's an issue with an illegal staircase with renters, not to mention a toddler, so we had to figure something out for ourselves. We had a couch there for a while, then sold it. For a few months it's been left open. Finally, a friend of ours hand-milled us some red cedar and Alex went to work building a barricade bookcase. We were half-expecting it to look awful there, but I'm happy to report it's beautiful and might just save us all from broken necks, or at the very least mom-stress.