The Bed to Beat All Beds

by Julie at Build, Sew, Reap

3 Days

Medium

I'll admit, I'm one of those moms who projects all her hopes and dreams for cool living spaces onto her family, particularly the children. As a result, the Snickerdoodle's room periodically gets cool little upgrades. Well, for his 4th birthday, he got more than a little upgrade. I'm going to let the photos mostly speak for themselves but first here's what his bed used to look like:

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Not bad, not bad at all. Here's what his bed looks like now:

It sits up nice and high on top of lots of storage. But wait! It gets better.

Yes, that's a slide.

In case you're wondering, I'll walk you through what's included here. The bed is the Ikea Kura bed with optional tent attachment up top. I had painted all the blue panels of the original bed with chalkboard paint and the natural wood frame with semi-gloss white paint when we first bought the bed. The bed now sits on a plywood platform (2 cut pieces actually since one wasn't quite big enough) that rests on three Ikea Trofast frames. The plywood is also supported in the back and under the slide by 2x6 wood screwed into the wall studs. I also added the vertical support and horizontal bed guards for the lower bunk to keep kiddos from rolling out in the event the Snickerdoodle has a sleep over.

We built the slide ourselves using 2 sanded 2x4s, an 18 inch wide scrap of plywood left over from the bed platform and an 18 inch wide piece of what I believe is intended to be dry erase board. We bought it at the Home Depot in an 8 feet by 4 feet piece for $13.97. The slide is 7.5 feet long and starts pretty high up so it is steep but apparently quite fun. At the top of the slide is a platform for him to climb onto before sliding down the slide.

Underneath it all is wide open space for a secret hideout (shhhh, don't tell him I told you). It is accessible by crawling under the slide which Mr BSR and I can both do (we just barely fit).

So, there you have it. I'll leave you with a few more pictures.

Lots of book storage.

Toy storage under the bed plus a nice place to hang his favorite throw blanket.

And here's the secret passageway into the fort under the bed. This is the view from under the slide. We also added a foam puzzle-mat as well as another rope light in the fort. Oh, and the Snickerdoodle has added hundreds of Legos if my last glance under there didn't deceive me.

It's been a couple of years since I built him this bed and he still loves it. His only regret is that our new kittens don't want to join him in bed but they've both tried out the slide which resulted in uproarious laughter from the Snickerdoodle (the kittens are totally fine and they tried the slide on their own, nobody encouraged them onto it but I do suspect they won't try it again).

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1 question

David Daniel Gibson on Nov 26, 2016
Do u have blueprint

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2 of 6 comments

Candice on Sep 23, 2014
It

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Michael Doescher on Oct 02, 2014
love the slide and I'm sure my little bug will too when I incorporate this into his bed

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