Bunk Bed Adventures

Jared here, I stole the blog from Kimmy to summarize the bunk bed build. Since the next four name Russell boy will arrive in about six weeks we decided to bunk the two oldest boys in Adam's room and turn it into the Jacob and Adam room. I thought I'd give it a whirl at building the boys bunk bed. I made Jacob's toddler bed so if I just made two and stacked them on top of each other...I mean how hard could it be. yeah right...I was about too find out. I found some hard ware too attach bed rails at Rockler.com along with the pins to hold the top and bottom bunk in line. So back when I first planned on this build I figured to make the bunk bed one solid piece and unable to separate. The room is quite small and two twin beds would not fit side by side if we ever wanted to split them apart. However that changed when I sort of forgot that original plan and cut the first pieces as if I was making too separate beds...oops. Now to find plans to build from. I found a few online but the stiles were not to my liking and you had to pay for the plans... being a rather fiscally restricted individual I decided against it. Kimmy had seen a model at Meijer she wanted me to look at. I liked it and decided to perform a little R&D (rip off and duplicate). Kimmy took the boys on a walk though the store and I walked over to the hard ware section to borrow a tape measure for a few minutes. Kimmy had a pad of paper and a pen and I stood next to the model for about fifteen minutes and wrote down all the dimensions I needed. So I took those numbers home found some graph paper and sketched out the different boards. Now I started this project about three weekends ago...and probably averaged 2 to 3 hours a night. Typically after the boys were in bed at 9 pm I'd head out to the work shop and fired up my little heater and work on it. I used a little nicer pine that I was use to so for just about every cut I practiced on a scrap piece first. This added to the time but cut down on my frustration as pine is really hard to stretch if you cut it too short. I finished it up this past week and Kimmy stained and polyurethane the majority of it... I did the fine sanding and the last two coats of polyurethane. And today was the magic day to see if it all fit together. And by the grace of God it did... I was pretty nervous as I'd never tackled such a huge project. I'd made the head boards and foot boards in two sets so I knew which one on bottom would line up with the one on top. I set the first one and then grabbed it's mate... and they didn't line up... I started to sweat. Then I realized I'd grabbed the wrong top piece. The right one fit like a glove. I still have all ten fingers and didn't bleed at all on this project... which I think is a first. Typically my saying goes that it isn't an official project unless I bleed while building it. Enjoy the pictures below, the boys loved crawling under it more than they did sitting in it.