The Bed is Complete (Basically)

Today, Grandpa Roger and I finished making Vivienne's toddler bed! I wanted to make her a toddler bed for her birthday (May 6, next week!). Before you ask, yes, I did much of the work. Grandpa Roger is quite the handy man and I learned a lot about measuring twice (or four times) and only cutting once, how to fix nails that I bent while hammering, etc. The only thing I didn't do at all was cut the boards because the power saw scares me; I'm more of a hand saw kind of girl. It still needs some wood putty to cover the screws/nails/chips completely and a nice paint job, but it's DONE and I think it looks pretty awesome. Check it out!

In grandpa Roger's garage where the bed was built. Vivi was giving him pointers on the drill. He was also really handy when it came to making adjustments to the design, which we got from www.ana-white.com (thanks Anna Krey for exposing me to it!). It's a great web site with plans for all sorts of things. I bought all the necessary materials (minus the tools, which grandpa had) for $40. This bed only cost $40 and took about 10-12 hours to build (over the course of 3 weeks).

Assembled in our room! We (and by we, I mean grandpa) changed the design to include some strategic screws so the bed comes apart into three pieces: headboard, body and footboard. It fit in the car and I only had to put in 10 screws to assemble it in the bed room. Note: easier said than done. Despite our best efforts to make sure there were no snaffus, I ended up making a hole with the screw by hand because for some reason it just wasn't lining up. I think I have callouses :) We added extra slat support for bed jumping.

I LOVE this headboard! And I pretty much did it all...under the expert guidance of grandpa...but a lot of by myself, too.

The footboard is also super cute and I pretty much did that part by myself (after getting started by grandpa). I made a couple boo boos, but it's still functional...and you can't see them from the pics (or unless I point them out), so who cares?!

With the mattress and covers! She loved it! Don't worry, it didn't stay in the middle of the floor. I pushed it against the bed and we have about as much walking space as we did before.

First fit on the bed. :)

Great Aunt Elizabeth got the honor of first bed time story in the new bed! Vivi also loved her 'pretty' earrings.

Happy to report she went right to sleep in her new bed! It also might have had something to do with the fact that it was almost 10pm by the time she got in it.