The Post about the Bunk Beds Feb 25th

[If you are reading this via email updates, check the site itself later today. I'm going to try and load some pictures of the room in question. Wish me luck]

Taking care of a baby doesn't seem like half as much trouble as preparing for their arrival. (Of course it helps that I work and get a pass on most of the sour moments, but I digress)

When our oldest was born it meant tearing apart the room we used as an office/library, disposing of one cherished collection after another from our more than quarter-century of child-free years, painting, and decorating.

Our second was a bit easier, since they were both girls and would share a room, but still involved a drastic reduction in income and space.

Alas, this third time to the maternity ward will produce the long awaited Parker, son of Daniel, son of Edward, Son of Michael, son of John.

'Bout time my wife's eggs managed to recognize a Y-chromosome.

(kindly skip the science lecture. Science will eventually discern that that while the man directly determines a child's gender, a woman's egg has a specific gender preference and can accept or refuse a given visitor.

Thus, it's all her fault)

Now, last summer we'd moved into a three-bedroom flat to give us more breathing room. Like most old houses in Milwaukee, the bedrooms are small. The girls occupied the smallest as a bedroom, and we made the second into a playroom for them, with my wife painting a mural complete with a castle and princess on the wall.

Parker's impending arrival meant scrapping the playroom, which broke my heart.

We needed to move the girls out of their room and into the playroom, but to do that seemed impossible. Two beds - even toddler sized - would chew up almost all the space in the room. Remember, we still had to account for their toys, rocking horses, TV, dresser, bookcase, and table.

The solution seemed to be bunk beds, but standard bunk beds would chew up most of the room too. No one seemed to sell toddler sized bunks, even online, and a carpenter we contacted said no one would make them because of the danger of putting a toddler on an upper bunk.

Well, necessity being the mother of invention and all, I decided to make them myself. My wife's brother offered to help, and I accepted. Since he knew what he was doing and I didn't, it seemed like a wise choice.

Let it be known that I am not well known for my mechanical prowess. I can tune up a car, I can do light household maintenance, and once upon a time I built a nice little shelf in shop class, but that's it. If I'm shown what to do I can replicate it, but I have very little experience and thus very little knowledge.

Plus I can't measure worth a damn, which is a bad trait for carpentry.

Never-the-less, we pushed on.

I based the plans on a picture of some beds I found online, and used some ideas from a very basic plan I found on a different site, but modified it quite a bit. We reduced it in size, making the top bunk only 51 inches off the ground and the total height (including a canopy) 67 inches. Instead of a single post on each corner we crafted duel posts secured with carriage bolts, which made the bed strong enough to hold the weight of both my brother in law and myself - some five hundred pounds - before we'd even finished making the braces or screwing it together.

We made sure the bed rails and ladder steps were spaced a safe distance apart, routered the boards to eliminate sharp edges, abandoned the original design for the bed support and used both 2x4's and particle board, and recessed the mattresses to prevent them from slipping.

It wasn't easy. It was time consuming, there were mistakes and do-overs, and it ran so close to the end of the pregnancy that my nerves were getting frazzled.

But we did it.

And we did it cheap too - the total cost was under $150, and that included the satin fabric my wife bought to drape the bed like a princesse's castle.

(as with everything, you don't see problems with a design until you actually use it. I found the height of the canopy so low my daughter hits her head, so we're redoing it. Which means the pictures don’t show the fabric, which sucks).

And did the girls like it? Please! On February 19th, the first day it was in the house, they didn't want to leave the beds all day, not even to eat dinner! And my twenty-month old took to her bottom bunk - her first time sleeping outside a crib - like a champ!

Now all that was left was the nursery.

Many thanks to Bob Kohn for his help in making the beds, Eric Chambliss for transporting it and his wife Chris for some free hardware for the construction, Jonah Slapczynski for helping sand them, and Jeanne Scorsone forthe loan of a second sander and for some fantastic work on creating the canopy.

 

PS. Here's a pic of the completed canopy - the only negative is we matched the sheer fabric too well to the walls, rendering it almost invisible.