Bunk Beds!

Two good reasons you should marry a "handy" man:

One:

And Two:

Ok, so that's actually the same bed.... BUT, there were two, and....together they made these!!

And then we sanded, and sanded, and sanded, and (you get the picture), stained and ended up with bunk beds for the boys!

I had been keeping my eye on Knock off Wood for a while, (which is now called Ana White Homemaker) http://ana-white.com/ If you haven't checked it out yet, I would definitely recommend it!

I had BIG plans to help Matt lots, do about half of the work, but I ended up doing much MUCH less than I thought. Although this sounds ridiculous there were some things that were a lot harder than I expected. The wood, for one, was really heavy. The 4 corner posts are 4 X 4's which were massive, and weighed a ton. The constructed parts, like headboards and footboards were incredibly hard to hold still for assembling. So glad I married a strong man!

Another thing that was hard was using the tools! High school shop class circular saw tutorial does not a tool afficiando make!

Also I was about 8 1/2 months pregnant. And feeling it!

Luckily Matt was more than up to the task! He did a great job and we LOVE them! Especially Joey!

The handsome builder himself:

Mostly I just sanded. I'm not going to lie, it was a thankless, boring job. Matt really needed to be freed up for the assembling and construction and each piece had to be sanded about a billion times. A billion. That was the worst of it.

The pieces were big. They had to be assembled in the boys room. We could have gotten them in assembled, but they would have been so heavy to move (and I was Matt's only help) that it was much easier to assemble them in the room. Stacking the beds was interesting. I didn't go into labor!

Staining in progress. I didn't actually take a picture of the finished product without stain on it. Whoops.

Testing out the bottom:

And then the top:

Looks pretty comfy!

And here is the completed space:

As you can see, we still have a crib in there. And we don't have rails or a ladder on the bed. The wood for the rails and ladder are in the basement, and the plans are ready to go. Right now, Matthew is still in his crib. We didn't put Joey in a bed until he was 3 and I'm thinking I'll wait that long for Matthew. Since sometimes nighttime is still party-time, it's best to have at least 1 boy contained. We'll probably move him sometime after he is potty trained, which we won't even start for another 6 months. (although Matthew did go in the potty the other night, but I'm just pretending that didn't happen :-) I also like that they cannot climb to the top bunk, since playing together they don't always have the best judgment. When we do add the ladder it will be on the side of the bunk and not the kind that triangles out from the bunk onto the floor. The boys room is small and the floor space doesn't need a ladder hanging out into it!

All in all we love it. With all of the wood, screws, stain, etc. (including bedding) it was probably about $350.

The plan was the "Simple Bunk Bed" plan from Ana White's website, although ours is more like this one: http://ana-white.com/2011/03/white-bunk-beds-ladder-instructions (with the ladder attached).

The bunks are "knocked off" from Land of Nod: http://www.landofnod.com/kids-bunk-beds/kids-furniture/white-simple-bunk/f5256

Matt made a few modifications, using plywood instead of slats and also used dowels to stack them, rather than screwing them together. It was interesting holding up the 100+ lb bed while we tried to get the dowels into the holes. I was sure Sammy would just fall out! Hopefully though that will make disassembling easier should we move or decide to use them as 2 twin beds....if we can ever get them apart.

We had such a great time traveling over the summer and visiting with all the Hennesseys and Beardsleys... the only thing that Joey missed, were his bunk beds!!