Thread: raised kids house style bed

Hi everyone, this isn't fine wood working but thought I'd share a recent project. I wish I took alot more build photo's.

in the spirit of the "chicken coop" I built our first kid from scratch... decided to build our 2nd his bed.
this was the first one I built:
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he seemed to really like it, and we went through a few irritations of the front gate for keeping him in till we ended up with a solid one. Since then we've moved house.





So for kid #2 its kind of a hacked together Ikea kura bed and trofast as stairs (fairly common setup online). It's a fairly common "hack" done online and I thought it would save a bit of time by having a good chunk of the bed pre-built by our sweedish friends. It's actually a bed you can setup down low or up as a bunk, though not exactly cheap at $399, but again I thought I was saving time:
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so after seeing a few youtube video's and some Instagram post's I got to work. First step was to goto bunnings.... shed a tear at the banana's disguised as timber and then goto a proper timber shop where the product is ALOT better.

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In the end its really just some 42mm battens/framing screwed to the original frame and a ridge beam installed and some "ship lap" style boards ontop for the roof. I had a few issues with rackings that was sorted out with some angle bracing. the wife also requested it be about 150mm higher which also added to extra costs and bracing as that is where a good chunk of the wobble was coming from. The different stained/coloured timber also stands out a bit but nothing totally jarring. In the end I probably could have built something from scratch and come out a $100 or $200 cheaper but I think his face in the last picture says it all

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safety wise.. so the mattress sits quite a bit lower then the entry door so he can't actually roll out during the night and we have stairs in house, so he actually goes up and down them daily and is quite comfortable on them. I may still add a hand rail to the stairs part just as a "just in case" buffer for him. But the little dude will gladly go up in there and drag the doona onto him self ready for bed.