The boys new bed

It was time to move Sam into Ben and Ethan's room, Sam was still in his crib in his room by himself.  I had moved all his clothes over to the big boy room to make room for Sydney's clothes but he was still happy in his crib and Sydney was in our room so it was working for us.  We have been racking our brain on what to do with the sleeping arrangements for the kids pretty much from the day I found out i was pregnant with baby #4. We thought of bunk beds with a double on the bottom and and a twin on top but that wouldn't last for to many years since 2 boys would be sharing. We also thought a trundle bed would work but that just took up more floor space and we are not working with a whole lot of room.  I dreamed about custom beds, where each kid would have their own space since they do have to share a room.  I showed J my inspiration picture and asked him if he thought he could build something similar.  Jason is not a carpenter by any means and building something is actually a lot more complex than one would think.  That one being me, I'm thinking just cut some boards and build a bed, should take ya about a day to finish. HAhaHa, my hubby has told me that I'm nuts!!!!

So finally one day Jason decides to really think about how we could do what I'm thinking and he starts making a plan.  He tells me he thinks that it can't be to hard so he goes out and buys some lumber and we get started, more like he got started.  The overall project took many days, we had a beautiful day in Sept where we couldn't pass up the beach, Ethan breaking his arm, than we had a bday party,  and things just kept coming up.  When you only have a sunday to work on things it doesn't give you much time so it took a little longer than the 1 day that I was originally thinking:)

i really liked this idea, isn't it neat... we didn't have 2 walls that we could do this on

this is what i envisioned

1st step was to sand all the lumber, which was very time consuming because we were using one of those little mouse sanders.

 While Jason sanded I got a little distracted with the beautiful day we were having and got a little side tracked taking pics of pretty things in our backyard!

Sam and I watched this bumble bee stick his little thing a ma bob down into the flower to extract the nectar, it was super cool and we sat there for quite a while watching him.

Ben's Shasta Daisy that he picked out for the garden.

I don't know the proper name for these things either but you know those little things on maple trees that twirl down to the ground when you pluck them and watch them fall, yeah those things.

my succulents that I put in the ground in the winter and dig out in the spring and put in pots.

oh and the prettiest little girl

being so good

and happy

jumping away and enjoying the sunshine beat down on her little body while we work

speaking of work, its my turn to work......

 I painted everything, we just went with the same color as all the trim and doors, which is Benjamin Moore Monterey White.

These are the braces that will hold all the plywood up, the braces are screwed into all the studs along that wall.

the width from the window to wall was exactly the width of a twin size mattress plus the 2" for the wood that will slide in there.

cutting out part of the baseboard to give it a real built in custom look, this was done with a dremmel

I'm missing a few steps here but once this part was done than Jason took the really long fat boards and screwed them into those braces, so you could see the 3 levels but there was no wood inside the levels to hold the mattresses.  For that he bought a heavy duty type of ply wood and slapped the sheets down onto the frame and ta da!!!!!  It was done!

This was the 1st night, we didn't have the ladder up yet.  Jason slept in the top part since Ethan couldn't pull himself up with his cast on.  Notice on Ben's level (middle) we used books as a rail to keep him from tumbling out.

We put the ladders on so they would also work as a rail to keep kids in their beds and not have any falling out of bed accidents.  The boys were very happy with the way it all worked out and so were J and I.  Didn't cost us very much in materials and its a huge space saver.  Now we just have to do something with the space at the foot of the bed, the boys like the idea of some storage and some bookshelves, kinda like in the inspiration photo.