Bunk beds are done!

I feel like I have finding/sanding/painting/fixing bunk beds for a year now--even though it's only been about 6 weeks.  Six weeks will feel like forever when you expected it to take less than a week.

Like I said in my post about my hopes for the girls' room, I bought a set of bunk beds for $40 at Deseret Industries (a local thrift store).  It had no hardware, but I thought that would be an inexpensive fix.  That and some paint and we could have some sturdy bunk beds for around $60! What a steal, right?

Well, it ended up being more like $60 in improvements before we (mostly my husband) felt like the bed was safe for the girls.

Here is how it started out:

It was VERY ding-ed up.  It had stickers on it, permanent marker drawings, places where they had stabbed it with a green ball-point pen repeatedly, places where the wood had chipped off, etc.  It had obviously belonged to some little boys. ;)

We knew it would have to be sanded well, and after going through three sanders (we have really bad luck), we finally got that done.  It basically was taken back down to the unfinished wood.  Then came painting.  I wanted white against the bright green walls, and we already had a ton of white paint, so I used some foam brushes to apply 2 - 3 coats of that.  The foam brushes worked the best for keeping brush strokes down, I thought.

After they were painted, I bought bolts, nuts and washers.  When we went to put them together, though, my dad (who was helping) informed me that they had built-in nuts, so I didn't need the washers or the nuts, which was a bonus.  Unfortunately, the bolts I bought were about an inch too long and didn't provide a way of tightening them without the nuts.  Another trip to Home Depot yielded a bolt with a phillips head that cost twice as much as the one without the little cross on one end.  I thought it was a little silly to pay twice as much for a small hole, but whatever--they were what we needed.

Then we needed a cross bar on the top bunk, so Miss E, who is still only 4, would not roll off the top.  At that point, we realized that the box springs we were going to use for support were too big, so we needed to buy some wood for support.  Long story short, 4 1x4s and two pieces of fiber board later, we had some bunk beds.

I was going to go all out and make new throw pillows and quilts for the beds that were matching, but I was SO done by that point, I just found some stuff I had and went with it.  I am very pleased with how they turned out! (Even without the matching.) :)

Voila! There you have it.  We finished them and I love them!  Now to teach Miss M how to sleep in a big girl bed.  (Yikes!)