Kevin’s Vent

Here is a link to a bunch of photos of us working on the Bunk Bed. As we work on it more, I’ll update this photo set.

After spending several hundred dollars on wood and hardware, it was time to cut, sand, nail and glue. 8 Year old Natalyn got a pretty good picture of me at work.

Of course any construction job is union operated and needs proper staffing. Supervision, Cleanup and Transportation are vital.

It took me about 2 weeks of random evenings to cut all the large pieces, sand them, and prime them with a base coat. Then I started assembly in the downstairs bedroom.

Since I was installing lights and electrical outlets in the bed, as well as building shelves and storage bins in the headboard, it took me another two weeks, including Saturdays, to finish assembly.

Of course it’s still not done, it needs to be painted and the hardware attached, which will still take a while, but the main structure is done, and the kids can climb on it, so as far as their concerned it’s good to go. Katie said to me before she went to bed “Daddy, if I get up early in the morning, you’ll find me playing on the Castle Bunk Bed”. I think it’s a hit!

So here are the girls modeling why they need a new bunk bed

Ok, actually the modeling part is making a scale model out of the plans.

I printed the plans onto cardstock, and then Natalyn helped me cut them out and glue them together. I probably didn’t need to do this since I had to have a good picture in my head to draw it in the first place, but I know that some of the family couldn’t quite picture it from the drawing, and it was also a nice quite Sunday activity I could do with my sweet, eldest daughter. Here are some pictures of the Model

Now that we know what it will look like the next step is to do some shopping.

Once we brain stormed what we wanted our bed to look like, it was time to formalize the design on graph paper. In school I took a drafting class and a woodworking class and really enjoyed both. While I don’t remember much, some of the basics came back as I worked on the plan. I started with the front view, the dashed lines are all hidden by the front of the bed, so it looks kind of busy.

You’ll also notice that I’m not including anything fancy like a slide, playhouse, or dresser. I don’t think I’m ready to build something like that yet. It does have shelves for each bunk as well as under-bed storage and a fold out desk.

A more simple view of the front shows the castle without all the hidden “features”

The side and back views are also simple, showing the desk, the climbing holds, and the window.

These drawings don’t look like much, but I spent several hours drawing and erasing trying to get them just right. The scale is 1 square=1 inch

Next I’m going to take these drawings and make a scale model out of them.

After looking at a lot of different plans in Part 2, we needed to come up with our own plans. I enlisted two local artists (very local) to sketch me some sample castle beds. We really liked the Caterbury castle, and focused our designs on a similar motif: simple, good for boys and girls, and an elegant style without being gaudy.

Natalyn did an excellent job of capturing the essence of the castle:

Meg’s sketches we’re remarkably similar to Natalyn’s in overall design, although with several extra features.

She had a very unique idea I really liked of a fold out desk built into part of the castle as well:

Next step will be combining these drawings into a workable plan.

In Part 1, after deciding we needed a new, fun bunk bed, we figured the next step was to look around for ideas. Ideally the bed would work for girls or boys (that’s right, I still think I’ll have some boys at some point).

On our last date night we visited our local Furniture Row. The first thing we saw there that might fit the bill was the Olivia. The top bunk gets to look out a window and there are openings in the side to climb up. Of course it’s $1000 and that doesn’t include mattresses or anything else.  They also had a boys version that was painted like a fire-station.
We had previously checked at several other places in town, and that was the only fun bunk bed any of them stocked. So now onto the online search. Boys and Girls both like castles, so we thought we’d try looking at some castle beds, but most turned out to be quite expensive, like this one for $6000.

PlayhouseDesigns.com had a lot of good castle designs, and they’ll even sell you the plans for them. Here’s a few that we liked.

Norwich Castle	Castle Bunk Bed (unique name)
Foxboro	Canterbury

None of these beds are sold locally, and even if they were, we couldn’t afford them. However I think that I can take a stab at doing something like this myself.  The next step is to come up with our own plans.

Meg recently finished painting Natalyn and Katie’s bunk bed and the rest of their furniture. She spent a lot of time painting it and distressing it, and the end result is a sweet looking furniture set that the kids can’t tear up because it’s already “aged”.

It looks great, but now of course Alaina is jealous. With another Groke on the way, our bed situation is once again changing. Our plan is to move Alaina and Whitney into a bunk bed of their own by the time the baby is born (End of Feb 2010).

We could just buy one, and Wal-Mart has a 200 Dollar bunk bed that will probably work, but that’s very boring. My dad built me a great bunk bed that lasted many years, I also remember when I was very little he built us a large play structure in the toy room that we could climb on and have fun with. Too bad we had to leave it when we moved to Japan. I would like to combine the two, making a good quality bed that also doubles as a play structure of some sort. So the next step is to search around and try to find some ideas and, as my mom calls it, “Scraplift” them. I’ll let you know what we find in Part 2.