Big Kids get Bunk Beds

We have a mid-bunk room in our RV and immediately knew our kids needed a space of their own. Wyatt was two years old and Peyton was 3 months old when we moved into the RV. Peyton had a little while before she could be on her own because I was nursing her so she had a pack-n-play in our room which didn't last long. Wyatt has always been good about sleeping on his own and we didn't want to mess that up.

Wyatt's Nursery

The very first thing we did, yep you know it, took out the new, bulky & not my style couch and sold it. We already had a grow-with-me crib that we had in our home and we used that for Wyatt. Now the tricky part was the doorways. They are narrow and you can't fit any normal piece of furniture through the door so we broke it down and rebuilt it in the mid bunk.

We basically could use everything we had in his room in the house for the RV. I think the only thing we had to sell was his dresser. Luckily this mid-bunk basically has a dresser. On the right side top cabinets I turned into his closet. The bottom cabinets are his toy bends which surprisingly held more than I expected. Then the long cabinet door on the far left is filled with necessities like diapers and wipes. We had a diaper pail and book basket. We even brought in our rocker/glider. Which by the way breaks down into like 4 pieces because there was no way of squeezing that through any door.

I felt at peace with how everything turned out because it just felt like home again. The kids didn't even notice the change. Until the kids grew and got big faster than we excepted. We had always had a thought in our mind of when the kids needed to share the bunk room but didn't anticipate it to be so quickly. So then our thought became another project very soon.

Designing the Bunk Beds

The thought was bunk beds with baby gates because both of the kids were still little and I didn't want them to crawl out and hurt themselves. Now to achieve this we went and looked at many stock bunk beds and essentially none of the bunk beds were going to fit in this slide-out. We then had to get creative and that is my middle name! We took some measurements to see how many pieces of boards we would need if we went to home depot. I wish I still had my aka blueprint of my design because it was exceptional if I had to say so myself. My other specialty is saving money so I added the total cost of what this project would have cost us from scratch. It didn't set so well with me because at the time lumber was triple the cost. So my juices got flowing again and I scrolled upon IKEA!

RV shopping at IKEA

Ikea, you are my favorite place to shop. Not only is it reasonable pricing but everything is lightweight. In case you don't know when RVing you can't just throw everything in the RV and expect to pull it with your vehicle. No! You need to be mindful of the towing weight on your vehicle along with the weight of your Rv. Here is an easy equation. RV weight + Personal Items weight = Under Towing weight on your vehicle, because you never want to max out your weight.

We ended up buying the Ikea MYDAL unfinished bunk bed frame. I know what your thinking, isn't this the same size as the other bunk beds so how is it going to fit in my slide-out? Well Yes, your right but it's called a tape measure and a saw. When I saw the price of lumber I couldn't even fathom messing up one board and eating up that money. With the Ikea frame, we knew we were going to rebuild this bed the way we wanted it to and everything was included in one price.

My vision was two cribs over one another. So we took measurements of a crib mattress to the bunk bed frame. Remember I have two kids under two and Wyatt was still on a crib mattress so building just another crib essentially above him was the great idea. I even got to paint it the same color as our living space which just allows cohesiveness in our RV. Now keeping kids safe in their beds was a challenge but we found on Amazon mesh baby gates that locked into place when extended upward and allowed air to come in. This allowed for minimal space for the gate to come down and it basically hides within the bed so we bought two.

The kids love their room and we did eventually take out the rocker/glider to allow more play space for them. As of now, I need my kids to stop growing up because who knows what other blueprints I'll be coming up with in the near future. Watch here how the baby gates look on their Bunk Beds!