Build-A-Bed

Hello, all!

Since we are lucky enough to have an amazing house, and lucky enough to have the ability to make it even MORE amazing, we decided to create our very own blog to document the process, so we can come back and laugh at ourselves in five years, and you can come and laugh at us now. 

Today, our subject is: the bedroom.  In fact, this will be our subject for a little while, because the bedroom needed some serious help. Who wants to sleep in a boring, personality-free room? Not me!  So, first on our agenda was a new bed.

Our old bed, while large (it was a king size), was kind of deteriorating. It was memory foam, which you'd think would be cool... but was not as cool as that implies. Neither of us were sleeping very well, so we decided to take a long, serious look at a sleep number bed.  Which we did.  Turns out those things are darn expensive. Who knew?

So, the sleep number was out, but there are other mattresses, and eventually after a long and mostly boring process we settled on a high-end bed that cost what one of the low-end beds at sleep number cost. The mattress-choosing process was not, however, what I want to emphasize here.  Because we also did not have a headboard, and while we were wandering around furniture row, we found this: 

(Spoiler alert: we bought it. That is it, in our house.) 

Yep, that lovely bed was on clearance for a mere $298, on account of its having a few dents, and a broken slat. 

Oh no! Dents!

Probably not going to hold anything up.

Yep. That's a problem all right.

So, new slats were in order. Rather than replace the broken one with one that would probably also break, we bought some plain trim - made of REAL WOOD - and used that instead.   

Much better.

We also used six, instead of the original three.  Just to be really, really sure we weren't going to have any problems, and especially because the foundations for the air mattress are heavier than box springs. Also, we are not exactly the smallest people in the world. (We're working on being smaller, but we'll never be THAT small!)

You'll also notice that the original slats had supports in the center. So we bought a nice long 2x2 and cut it down to create six center supports. We used one of the original, not-broken slats to make sure our new and improved version lined up right.

See how ours (in the back) look sturdier? Yeah. That's a good thing.

We used deck screws to make sure that those slats weren't going anywhere.

This was Troy's idea.

A little bit of decoration, courtesy of some wonderful friends and family...

A little bit of furniture rearranging...

Pay no attention to that Pepsi bottle on the dresser!

... and we were in business!

Bonus: the bedding actually came free with the bed frame. And by "came free" I mean "they told us that they wouldn't sell us the bed unless we took the bedding." This bedding was actually sitting on the bed next to the one we bought, but we asked if we could switch them out since we liked this one SO much better. Thankfully, it wasn't a problem, since I don't know what we would have done with the ugly thing that was on this bed before!  And this, though it is seriously the heaviest comforter I have ever slept under, at least looks pretty nice and is well-made enough that it will withstand some abuse.

So, all in all, the bed upgrade was a success! We hope to get around to patching up those scratches down the road, but we need to find the right color of stain first. Don't want to make it worse. For now, I scribbled over them with one of those furniture touch-up pens you can get at Walmart, and they're barely noticeable at all.

Next stop: the door.