The Bunk Bed

This bunk bed for our boys has been the funnest thing! We'll all be sad to leave it when we move.

Here's how we did it..

I started with the Brookstone storage bed from Ana White for the bottom bunk and tweaked it to make it work for us. And I used Minmax Wood Finish in Classic Gray.


Here's how ours turned out...

Turns out this part of construction was really easy and quick...maybe that should have given us a heads up about how time consuming the rest was going to be!

I loved this clubhouse bed from Pottery Barn Kids and found the plans on Ana White's website. We ended up just having the "club house" wall on the back because of the fan in our room.

Insert sweet hubby acknowledgement here... Jonathan was a great sport through all this... um ... craziness. It was such a sweet experience to be able to build this bed with my mom and Jonathan was very selfless to let us do it. Don't get me wrong we had math questions for him, but he also liked to draw 3D diagrams for all the "made up" steps....

 And Mom and I kinda like to fly by the seat of our pants... while we were standing in Lowes! Several of our trips to Lowes had me driving home like this... oh the looks we got from the workers... haha

The legs and the supports for the top bunk went up.

 I had to channel my inner gymnast while climbing up and balancing while up on the temporarily unstable bed frame...

The railing up

We built our stairs as big boxes and then made the tops with hinges so I could have extra storage. 

Somewhere in all the planning... Mams decided the boys needed a slide to get down from the top bunk. Then she found one all ready to go at Lowes and it was a done deal.

 We decided to build a little platform for them to step down onto before they actually slide down. 

 The clubhouse piece was a bit tricky to attach (darn you uneven ceiling!). We found these interlocking panel pieces that looked "club house-y". That meant I didn't have to paint it to make it look like panels! Yay!

We got tired of cutting, then moving it in to check it, then having to take it down, to cut it again... so we brought the saw to us and probably ignored some warnings written on the tools...

We went ahead and moved Luke into the bunk bed because we didn't have a free weekend for me to stain the bed for a while. He was so excited!!

Staining the bed took forever! And the inventor of that staining/painting mitten is a genius and should be a bajillionaire. It made staining those banisters possible.

Here's the finished product with both boys moved in.