Extreme Room Make-Over

***The Birmingham News is doing an article this Saturday about the boys "Hanging Beds", so we bumped this post from earlier in the summer to the top page. Turner & Clay were thrilled to get to be in the pictures!***

Several days ago, Meghan and I were talking and decided the boys' room could use a little sprucing up in order to make a bit more useful for them as they are growing up, need a little more space and just to give their room a change. You see, for the past 3 years, their room has pretty much been a place for sleeping, piling dirty clothes, stuffing clean clothes, cramming the junky trinkets from birthday party favor bags (sorry if I offend anyone, but come on parents, you know EXACTLY what I mean), infrequent piano practices, and the occasional "prison" for the typical "Go to your room!" parental command at the end of some stand-off or argument. All that to say they don't spend much time in their room with their eyes are open.

Here's what we had to work with.

Yes, we have a basement that is just begging to be finished out, but of course that takes a good bit of $$$ (which we don't want to spend), time (which we do have), and 2 boys willing to sleep down there (which we don't have-they are too yella). So until all the stars align, we have put that project off. In the meantime, we decided to get creative and make the most of the bedroom they currently call their own and do a room makeover. We knew we wanted to paint and get them some fun, new furnishing. But most of all, we wanted to open up the space so it would be more functional for them and hopefully become a place they would like to use for more than just sleeping. To create more usable space, we were thinking of selling their bunks and building some loft beds. As we were searching images online, I stumbled upon this post on Bob Vila's site which had a few pictures of "hanging beds," something neither of us had ever seen before. It looked simple enough and with a little creative engineering, I figured I could create something similar for the boys. The whole idea behind a hanging bed is to free up as much floor space as possible while still having a bed in the room. What we really like about the hanging beds, besides the obvious novelty of having hanging beds, is that there aren't 4 long legs supporting each bed and taking up space which is what we noticed on most of the loft-style beds we saw. And with further investigation, I figured out how to create the hanging beds from their existing bunk beds, which meant we had no lumber to buy! It was a no-brainer for this frugal couple! So now we had a plan and decided to make it happen. We kicked the boys out of their room, forbade them from entering it until we were done and then we got busy doing our own version of extreme room makeovers. I think the hardest part of the whole deal was moving the boys out of their room for a few nights and cleaning out all the random stuff that they have accumulated over the years from collections of paper airplanes and pencil grippers to rocks and scraps of wood from who knows where. Meghan started the transformation by taking down all the stuff from the walls and applying a few new coats of paint, changing the color from blue to taupe and making it feel fresh and clean. Also, she bought a couple of cool orange chairs to add to their new room. Meanwhile, I began phase 2, which was the bed reconstruction. Enter the drills, power saw, sander, etc. I took the bunks apart, made some measurements, incorporated a whole lot of guesswork and within a few hours, I had them back together. But now they looked a little different because they were attached to the wall and appeared to be hanging from the ceiling!

The first bed almost complete. Doesn't it look like it's hanging?!

I tested each bed's sturdiness and upon realizing they were safe and sound, we began putting everything else back together. There was still quite a bit of work to do with placing all the furniture, cleaning up all the sawdust, making the ladder, and figuring out what needed to stay in their room and what needed to go to the attic, but we made it happen. And after 4 days of the boys being sequestered, we invited them back in for the grand unveiling!

Oh yeah, they like it!

They were super excited and very grateful to say the least! They both told us at least 20 times how much they loved it and appreciated us doing it for them. Now they are wanting to invite all their friends over to see it and hang out in their cool new room! Trust me when I say that before now, they never really cared about bringing their friends into their room. I even overheard quotes like "our room is totally tricked out" and "it's all a kid could ever want." Big points for mom and dad! I think those quotes make it all worthwhile. This is one occasion where we can confidently say that our efforts towards trying to make our boys happy have been overwhelmingly successful!