Gas, tires, oil.

We wanted to get the baby into his own bed in the kids room, but there wasn’t room for three beds in there. The obvious solution was to put the older kids in a bunkbed, but I was worried about the baby climbing up and falling off. The room is small and there isn’t really a spot to put a bunk bed that’s not close to a dresser. When I was a kid, a friend of my parents had a kid die after falling off a bunkbed and hitting his head on the corner of a dresser, so I want to avoid that if possible. I know there was no way to keep the youngest one from climbing up, so I started thinking of a way to modify a bunkbed so that you climb up to the top bunk a different way. I thought about a ramp or a slanted ladder that would lead out the side instead of the end, but there wasn’t room. But then I thought that if you could climb up from the lower bunk on the inside of the ladder, you would only fall back onto the lower mattress. To prevent climbing (and gymnastics) on the outside of the ladder, the bed could be put in a corner against a wall. Step one was finding a bunkbed at a yardsale for $20. It had a futon for the lower mattress, but I removed that so we could use our current mattress and frame for the bottom ( you can see how I used the futon frame for a railing at the end). Then we got a cheap mattress from Big Lots for the top.

To make an opening to climb through, I used a muffler cutter to remove several slats.

Then I had to shorten the mattress to match the opening. First I pulled the staples and pulled back the covering to see how it was made.

Turns out that this cheap kid’s mattress just has a wooden frame and foam pad.

After laying it out, I cut the frame (there’s two marks because I reused the cross piece at the end and had to shorten the frame by its width also).

Here I using the end piece to layout the cut on the inner frame rail.

A few drywall screws and its stronger than original.

I stapled it back up and made sure they were flush with a mini ball peen hammer.

Within secounds of throwing the shortened mattress up on the frame to check for fit, the baby was already climbing up the outside ladder on the opposite end.

I wanted a railing anyway, since my daughter (who was getting the top bunk) has been known to fall out of bed. I used the futon frame (already the right length in one direction).

I just shortened it in the other direction with a tubing cutter.

I put plastic plugs in the ends of those tubes so no one would take a core sample out of their forehead. So far its worked great. We just fold the fitted sheets under the mattress to take up the slack.