Sweet Pea Bunk bed Part 1-- front and side panels

Aka:  the bed that took over my house and my life.  

If you are interested, here are the links to Part 2--stairs and shutters, Part 3--pergola and window boxes, Part 4--drawers and cubbies, and Part 5--the finale!

Last Thanksgiving (2106), I was having a conversation with my daughter-in-law about getting some bunk beds for my granddaughters.  They were expecting a new baby and needed some extra room in their apartment.  At first we were talking about buying a simple bed, but as we looked at more and more pictures online, we came across this beautiful bed at Anna-white.com and my hubby and I both naively said "we can build that--and finish it by Christmas!"  Ah, funny us. 

Here is a link to the original blog: http://birdsandsoap.com/2012/09/sweet-pea-bunkbed.html

Here is the link to the Anna-White plans: http://www.ana-white.com/2012/09/plans/sweet-pea-bunk-bed

Isn't it beautiful? 

The plans seemed pretty straight-forward, even though we have not tackled this type of thing before, we felt comfortable with our ability to do it.  Of course I can never leave well-enough alone and immediately started making some changes lol.

  

Our first problem was that we had no place to work.  In Oregon in the winter, that means rain, rain rain.  Our small house with our small single car garage just has no place.  Our garage is full of lumber and house parts.

Luckily, one of Rusty's friends offered an area of his warehouse for us to use temporarily.  We wanted to start with pre-painting all the wood before we assembled it, however the garage was unheated and we got hit with a week of super cold below-freezing weather and I didn't feel comfortable trying to paint when it was so cold. 

So we ended up in the house after all.

After we got a bunch of the slats painted, I decided I didn't like this yellow. 
You can guess that Rusty was thrilled to hear that.   

Back to the paint store to get a softer yellow.  I like this a lot better.

One of the changes we made was to use tongue and groove 1x6 siding instead of the straight 1x6 and 1x4's listed in the plans.  I liked the look of it, it looks a lot more like house siding, however it was somewhat of a pain to work with.  Had some problems convincing the tongue  to go in the groove and a couple of times the tongue broke off. 



Small house--big project = tripping over wood everywhere. 



This picture reveals too many of my secrets lol. 
The pile of toys for the grandkids, the doorway we are closing off, the walls we are in the process of re-skim coating. 

This also shows our new coat closet we have added in the living room.  Will have to do a post about that soon. 

 One of the things we wanted to do was to make the top and bottom halves of the bed separate pieces.  I knew that the bedroom where this bed was going was down a tight hall and we were concerned about being able to get the bed in the room.  So instead of making the front and back panels all one piece, we cut them in half. 

This is a self-centering dowling jig.  This way we could make sure the dowels lined up as far as keeping the top attached to the bottom. 

You can see the dowels

Putting the top and bottom halves together.



The outer boards for the front and back panels. 
We did all 4 boards this way.  It works really well. 


By now the weather had warmed up some, at least we were not getting the below freezing temps so we moved over to Rusty's friend's garage. 

Started by putting the front panels together:






Here you can see how the T&G siding makes this nice groove at the joints. 




Front panel layout. 

In addition to putting dowels in to hold the top and bottom panel pieces together, we added a couple of pocket hole screws just to keep it from moving. 

You can see the holes for the pocket screws below Rusty's hand.

We also decided to make the front of the lower bunk open up to improve access to the lower bunk.  We used piano hinges on the sides to make them open up--it has been super handy to have them open this way. 



Lots of pilot holes to drill.  We bought a self-centering drill bit for this.  It was really important that the screws for the hinge go in straight.



Then lots of tiny little screws to put in.

I love that the sides open all the way. 



We used these sliding bolts to secure the doors on top and bottom.   

At this point things moved along pretty quickly and the box of the bed itself came together, as well as starting work on the stairs. 

 Another change we made was to make the bed wider, in anticipation of adding shelves inside each bunk.  Again, knowing that the bed was going to take up 75% of the girl's room, we were concerned about not really having any other spot for dressers, toy chest, etc so we put more storage inside.  I added 9" in width, which actually turned out to be a little too much.  7" would have been better.


I think at this point I will put an end to part 1 of this post.  Stay tuned for the next part--stairs and shutters!