Tyler's Bunk Beds and a Glimpse of Dan Fonner.

We put Tyler in his big boy bed several months ago, but never really did a "makeover" on his room to upgrade it from nursery to little boy decor.  I finally got around to that.

But first, we assembled the bunk beds.  Since we don't have a guest bedroom, I came up with the brilliant idea to use the bunk beds from my childhood in Tyler's room.  That way, when we have guests, Lily can sleep in Tyler's top bunk and the guests can have Lily's room.  Jenny let us use her part of the bunk beds my Dad built eons ago.  I was talking to Mom and we were trying to figure out when they were built and best we can guess is, I was probably about 6 years old.  For anyone who's counting, that makes these beds about 28 years old. 

With a homemade bed of that age, a few years ago, we had to modify my bunk because the screws holding the brackets for the side rails were all stripped out.  So we had to make the same modifications to Jenny's bed since we were stacking them on top of each other.  Joel finished up that part of the project and then the bed just hung out in the play room until we could find a spare 20 minutes to assemble it all together.

Joel and I decided to tackle the 20 minute bed assembly after we got home from a very full weekend in Cincinnati.  I'm setting the stage for you here people.

1. We expected it to take 20 minutes max to just put it all together.
2. We had just spent the day at the zoo.  And then drove 2 hours home.  We (and the kids) were tired.  
3. It's about 6:00 at night, the kids are ready for dinner and need they baths.

We get all the pieces into Tyler's room.  My bed was a top bunk and Jenny's was a bottom bunk (which make no sense to me because she should have had a top bunk too but whatever) so that should have meant that all the right holes were drilled in each bed to stack them up.

We had to cut dowel pins for use in stacking the beds so I measured the depth of one of the holes.  Then for giggles, I measured a second one.  Totally different - like 50% difference in depth.  So I measured all the rest of the holes and every single one of them was completely different.  And then I discovered that my headboard was drilled out and ready for the dowels but the foot board wasn't.  I do not understand this.  So, Joel drilled out all the holes to the same depth and cut the dowels all the same length.

Then we moved in to stacking the beds.  Nothing was square.  Bottoms were not lining up to tops. Side rails were not sliding into place.  We couldn't get the box springs to fit down in the frame.  We broke one of the side rails trying to make it fit and then had to repair again.  We'd go to tighten up screws and find that some were Flathead and some where Phillips so we were constantly switching tools.  We couldn't figure out how in the world the ladder was attached.  

Tyler's 10x10 room was a total wreck of two twin size beds partially assembled, wood chips and sawdust, tools, 2 children excited about climbing into the "treehouse bed," a frustrated husband and an exhausted, bawling me.

I said, "Babe, (sob, sob, gulp) I'd like to introduce you to my Dad."

I don't know that I could have planned out a better way for Joel to see a side of my Dad and his ad hoc, slap-it-together, fly-by-the-seat-of-his-pants approach to things like woodworking.  I seriously have no idea how in the world these beds originally went together.  I have no idea how there was never a collapse when we were growing up.  We still don't know how the ladder was installed.  I'm beginning to think it was with double sided tape.  In my Dad's defense, one of the problems we encountered was self inflicted.  These beds didn't have box springs when we were kids but I didn't remember that at first.  That's why we had such a hard time putting them in.  It wasn't supposed to be there.  But the rest of the issues....that's all my Daddy.

So that 20 minute, put it together exercise, ended up being more like 2 hours.  But we finally got it done.  Whew.

Now on to decorating.  Basically, I narrowed my scope to decor that would match the green paint on the walls because I was not in the mood to repaint.  I found a few different bedding options at Target that I thought would work and Joel settled on a sports related theme.

I think it all came together pretty good.  I'm still on the lookout for some items to hang on the wall.  I reckon there's a good chance I'll get around to that some time before Tyler turns 7 and wants decorate his room like Minecraft or whatever equivalent thing is popular then.