We got these magnetic baby proofing locks (the only true baby-proof locks in my opinion). When installing them by the instructions, we were pulling our hair out. They come with these templates you’re supposed to use on the cabinet and the door to align the locks which honestly overcomplicated the entire process and took forever. We came up with a easier solution.
First, just put some two-sided tape on both the lock and the latch. We used 1/16″ and 1/8″ tape as that’s what we had laying about. You can’t rely on this as a total solution, but that’s what the screws are for.
First, attach the little latch part to the top of the cabinet hole. The prepare the lock mechanism’s tape and hold it in place from an adjacent open door if you can. Close the cabinet door and make sure the tape sticks. Since it’s foam tape, there’s a little play which will still allow you to open the door if you try, so screw in the latch at the top of the cabinet hole and make sure that the fit is still tight by closing the door and testing it. This gives you a little wiggle room to work out exactly where the locking mechanism should be screwed into the door. Once you figure it out, screw it in place. This method took literally 30 seconds per latch verses like 5 minutes per latch using the provided templates.
If you can’t reach it from another door to hold it on the inside, then just try to close the cabinet door as close as you can and eye where it should be mounted. An example of this would be drawers. In this case I used 2 kinds of double-stick tape, but you can use one.
First, I attached the locking mechanism to the drawer. Then using the thin doublestick tape, I attached the latch to the locking mechanism.
Then I closed the door completely, and lifted up on the drawer slightly. This attached the latch to the inside top lip of the cabinet. I then took the drawer out and screwed the latch in.
You can see here that the latch and lock are slightly off-center from one another, but there’s enough intermeshing that it still serves its purpose. I found out all too well when I had accidentally left the magnetic “key” in the drawer once and shut it. I had to search the house for a magnet strong enough to unlock the mechanism because I couldn’t open the drawer without breaking something.