Child Proofing My Cabinet

I bought this cabinet for extra storage space after my second daughter was born. As I knew toddlers like to explore and open doors of cabinets and drawers, I purposely requested the furniture shop owner not to install any handles on the cabinet doors and drawers. We adults would just open doors and drawers by grabbing the sides. Worked fine for us for a few years because my girls never bothered with the 'doors that cannot be opened'.

Came my son Yang who was even more curious with never give up attitude. He was very interested with the doors and would spend time studying the opening at the sides. One day, he managed to pry open the doors and there was no turning back since. He would open the doors time to time and take everything that looked fun to him. Baking utensils, snacks that I bought but want to 'hide' from the children before giving them, pasta, can food, containers etc. Smacking and reprimanding him was not effective at all at this curious stage.

I was not keen to install those child proof thingy looks ugly and since Yang would probably be the last baby in my house, I did not want to waste money and space later to store those things. I came out with a very simple but effective solution. To turn the doors and drawers side of the cabinet facing the wall but the ugly plywood side would be facing us.

 Before

Luckily, it was very easy to solve as I had been to a 'DIY shop' very frequently and there were all sorts of unique stuff that could help solve our organizing and home improvement problems. I bought 2 rolls of wood patterned adhesive paper to co-ordinate with the cabinet surface at the front and sides.  I spent one night measuring and sticking and came out with nicer looking back of a cabinet. I bought some fruit stickers and pasted on surface to distract my son from discovering the sides of the adhesive paper and starting to peel them off.

 After

He was a bit annoyed for the first few days because he knew the doors had been turned to the other side. He tried to slip his arms at the gap between wall and cupboard but no avail. I distracted him by teaching him names of fruit on the stickers. So he started learning 'Nemon' for lemon and 'Memon' for water-melon. Mummy won this round. Ha! Ha!

It worked fine for me as the things stored inside were those I need only once in a while. I would need to move the cabinet out to get my things but it was a lot better then having Yang opening the doors every hour.