A couple of weeks ago, on the last weekend of half term, George went to stay with his Grandparents
in Taunton from Thursday to Sunday. Rosie and I thought this would be a good chance to replace his
bed. The above timelapse shows the process of sorting the bed, which was a bit of a mission (see
below) and the room completed. I hope you like it. Read on if you want to know more about it
.
In August 2015, George made the bizarre decision to move from his comfortably sized bedroom at
the back of the house to the box room at the front of the house. His main storage is a massive Ikea
shelving unit, so moving into the box room meant that he had virtually no space to play in his room!
He had approximately 2m x 0.5m of floor space between his bed and the shelving unit, then the floor
space where the door swings open. Maybe, at 3 years old, George couldn’t see an issue with this, but
we weren’t sure. Anyway, we let him move and he has loved it ever since. However, his bed was second
hand and was only meant as a stop gap until we sorted him a new one. That was almost 3 years ago now
so we felt it was about time we got around to it 
.
In an effort to give George more space in his room without moving him back to the old one (which he wasn’t happy doing) we decided to go for an Ikea cabin bed to free up floor space for him. The problem with that though is that the Ikea bed is 2.1m long and the space for it was only 1.95m, therefore we needed a fair amount of time to be able to modify the bed to suit. Unfortunately, for some unknown reason, we decided that whilst the rest of the furniture was out of the bedroom, maybe we could redecorate as well. This would have been fine normally, but I was working on Friday and we were both running the Pontypool 10k Home Run on the Sunday before going to Taunton to pick him up. This was going to be a bit of a mission!
On Thursday night, once Rosie was home, we dismantled his bed and removed his shelving unit, then I
went running and Rosie did an initial white obliterating coat to the whole room. Once I got back and
the walls had dried out, we did another coat of white ready to get the colour onto the walls. George
decided that we needed to “make it light blue. It will brighten up the bat cave”. I can’t argue with
his logic, but we wanted something that was hardwearing and washable (given all his eczema cream
that gets spread everywhere) so the colour choices were limited. Rose selected a fairly bright blue
but we were both a little unsure about it after the first coat. Thankfully George loves it! He did
tell us it’s not the colour he wanted, but it is “nice and bright so it is ok” 
. By the
time I got home on Friday night, Rosie had finished the first coat of blue and we were nearly ready
to get the last coat onto the walls so we would only have to build the bed and put up the new light
on Saturday . It certainly looked like we were going to manage it with time to spare.
It took us a fair while to get ourselves motivated to start on Saturday morning, but we got going
about 11 and started work measuring and cutting down the long timbers that make up the bed frame.
The timbers had oval shaped mortise and tenon joints on the ends, but it wasn’t too difficult. We
managed to get them cut down in just under 2 hours including test building the bed in the garage. A
good start all in all, but that is where things began to get a little bit more troublesome. As I
mentioned above, the bed was almost 15cm too long for the space, but we couldn’t cut more than 15cm
off, because otherwise the mattress wouldn’t fit. Normally Ikea furniture is dead easy to fit
together, and this was no exception. The coach screws screwed in easily with the provided allen key
from the two ends of the bed, however, the two ends of the bed were against the walls 
!
We had to build the bed insitu, and that involved a fair amount of discussion as well as pulling,
pushing, twisting, cursing etc. With a little ingenuity, some needle nosed pliers, a hacksaw and
more patience than I realised I possessed, we got the bed together in his room. It only took
8½ hours longer than the trial run did in the garage!
Everything else was easy in comparison so we were finished by about 10pm and had nothing to distract
us from our run on Sunday. When we brought George home, although he was absolutely shattered and
basically asleep, he was really excited to see his new room and, so far, he loves it! He loves
having somewhere to play and to read his books without having to carry everything downstairs
.