Sweet Pea Bunk bed--Part 4 drawers and cubbies

If you missed what has happened to this point, here is Part 1--front and side panels, Part 2--stairs and shutters, Part 3--pergola and window boxes, Part 5--the finale!

Alright, here is the next-to-the-last post--the drawers and the cubbies.  This is the post where I admit I got a little carried away and Rusty had to step in and rein me in.  As you can see we have gone from winter to summer--about the end of April/beginning of May our other obligations interfered and were were not able to work on the bed again until the end of August.  So it sat.  In the way. 

Starting with the easy stuff--the cubbies.  In part 1, I mentioned that we made the bed wider so as to be able to add shelves/cubbies in the bed itself. 

This is the one for the upper bunk.  Fits around the windows.



I debated on having all the boxes open, but then figured "why not?"

The upper shelves installed

For some reason I don't have a lot of pictures of the lower shelves.  But they are pretty straightforward. 

The final product--plus granddaughter detritus.



So the drawers.  The main thing we added was to have some drawer guides drop down from the lower bunk slats.  We had a bed for my son at one time that had drawers that went underneath, but no guides, etc.  The drawers were always bumping into each other and were a pain to fit.  Seeing as these are so large, I didn't want them getting off track. 

We dropped this board down from the bed slat above.  We ended up adding some 1x2 "runners" on the bottom of the 1x6 as further guides. 

You can see how the drawers move along the guides.

So the drawers themselves.  What can I say.  I just kept painting lol. 

Stenciled this design on the side of one of them. 



The beginning of the grass design. 



I wanted the trays to be pretty and functional as well.  Took some figuring out but ended up using the router to make slots so that I could add dividers into the trays. 

This ended up not being the easiest thing to do, as to get the slots to line up you have to be pretty exact in your measuring, and I admit I wasn't the best at that.  But brute force works on a lot of things lol. 

The end result of the drawers/trays.  I made each tray slightly different, from large boxes to small boxes.  I figured little girl clothes you could use the ability to separate tiny underwear, socks, etc.  One thing I did that I forgot to take a picture of is on the lower part of the drawers (the part under the trays) I made a divider about half-way back from the front.  These drawers are really long (like 5 feet) and I didn't want important items in the front migrating to the back of the drawer.  So the divider splits the drawer into two part--the front for frequently used items, and the back for storage of items used less often. 

I finished off the front of the doors by adding these wood cut-out shapes.  I purchased them at a variety of places--JoAnn, Michaels, and Hobby Lobby.  Some of them were already painted, and initially I thought that would be great and save me some time, but when I put them together I didn't really like the quality of the painting and they didn't exactly match my color pallet so I ended up painting over them. 

The grass is all stenciled.  I like how it turned out. 



The drawer pulls are plastic jewel-looking pulls I ordered off Etsy.  Pink, blue and purple.  If you look closely at the pink flower under the blue dragonfly, you can see that the drawer pull came off the mount.  So we glued it back on with some E6000 glue.  That happened the first night when an excited granddaughter stepped on it. 

Overall I'm very happy with how the drawers turned out.  I had all these ideas of adding other touches to the bed itself (painted flowers, etc) but luckily I ran out of energy and Rusty ran out of patience. 

We also added these clear plastic bumpers to the drawer between the front of the drawer and the tray.  After I waxed up the tracks for the trays they were moving pretty quickly up and down their track and I was worried about little fingers getting pinched. 

One of the drawers in use.

So that's the drawers and the cubbies!