Groundhog's Day

It may be Leap Day, but today's post is for February's other claim to fame, in honor of Punxsutawney Phil. Last week, I was out in the backyard and saw this:

To be fair, we don't actually know what made the hole, or if anyone is living in there at the moment. We figured it was so broad and deep that it might even have another exit, though we haven't seen signs of any other such holes around the yard. For scale, here's a branch that we found laying nearby:

And here's the same branch, twisted around a corner until its entire length was underground. The hole clearly kept going after that, but switched back in a way that made it hard to find anything that would go through and give us an estimate of how long it went.

Hoping that we weren't going to trap anyone inside, we used a large portion of a bag of compost sitting in the shed to fill it in, trying to press it as much as possible. One week later, the hole hasn't come back.

I wonder who was setting up a home in our yard. I hope they're ok, but I also hope they go elsewhere. Heck, right next door is a giant empty lot just begging for a network of groundhogs/moles/bunnies.

Making it fit

As promised last time, I want to talk about the various loft and bunk beds we were considering, in the hopes that some of our discoveries prove helpful to readers one day.

Big Kid wanted "a bunk bed" but Little Kid didn't seem entirely convinced that she wanted to be on a lower bunk. Considering that she was just moving out of a crib with dropped sides, I felt like I wanted a bit more infrastructure for her anyway (most of the bunk beds had no edges on the bottom, so we would have had to put up an extra bed rail at minimum), plus we already had the blue bed, so it felt wasteful to me to get rid of it before two kids had had a go at it (even though we obviously would have passed it along and not trashed it). So a bunk or a single person loft bed were both options.

We knew we were going to keep the kids in one shared room and we were dealing with vaulted Cape Cod ceilings, making a full-height bed possible only in very limited places (all of which already had other high furniture against it). This almost automatically defaulted us to IKEA because most other stores only offered full-height beds. For example, Pottery Barn Kids makes absolutely GORGEOUS bunk and loft beds (some with a full staircase!) but they were all impossibly high for our ceilings.

We also had one long dresser that we wanted to keep in the room, and--given our room layout--everything had to fit along one wall. So we measured the existing dresser and blue bed and both baseboard heaters and realized that some beds simply would not work. Though they were all twin width, the frames themselves varied. We also had another frustrating problem--the ladder location mattered. Given the way the dresser was going to be pushed against the edge of the bed, it was quite possible that a ladder would be blocked by other furniture or a wall. This will make more sense when I show you the final picture:

You can see that the space tolerances were so close that in fact the dresser extended under the loft. Thank goodness the legs of the dresser are set back a few inches from the edge and thank goodness the heights all worked. So this quickly took bunk beds over 41'' wide out of the running as well. MYDAL, as minimalist as it was, was about a half inch too big:

TUFFING was a possibility. It was low and narrow and the centered ladder avoided some of the problems I just described. However, there were only a few uncomfortable-looking narrow metal bars supporting the mattress. And since the mattress could be no more than 5'' high (given how short the sides of the bed were), this suggested the bed would be pretty uncomfortable even for a tiny person.

 Compare that to the KURA we ended up purchasing, with much wider and more frequent slats:

Thanks to the KURA's shape (i.e. the fact that the dresser could partially sit within the bed frame), we knew it was the best choice. However, when we purchased it, we didn't think we could decide on where to put the ladder. All the product descriptions, in-store models, and catalogue pictures only show the ladder on the opposite side to where we have it in the picture. That would have forced us to put the bed on the left wall, which wasn't as good, since that wall is shorter (currently the blue bed is shorter than a standard twin, so it fits fine, but a twin would be longer than the wall). So imagine our happy surprise when, as I detailed last time, we opened the instruction manual to find that it was customizable. It was a challenge to find a good thin mattress--again the warnings stated that the mattress had to be under 5'' due to the low sides of the bed. But we ended up opting for a Linenspa model online rather than an Ikea one and it does the job even for a big person like me (we figured ANYTHING would be comfortable to someone who barely weighs 40 lb). Changing the sheets is a little complicated but at least this bed is short enough that it's not too bad.

You get a bed and you get a bed and you get a bed

Our Ikea surge continued a couple of months ago when we added yet another Swedish furniture addition to our house. This time, we added another bed to our collection and was one of the harder decisions that we've had to make when considering our options at Ikea (usually we do our research on the website and are in and out in possibly record time). Today I'll show you the building process and next time, discuss the pros and cons of each item we considered, so that maybe if you're considering similar items, you can find our research useful. Big kid wanted a "bunk bed" and after much consideration, we opted for the KURA. 

I don't want to boast that we've become really good at this, but I may have set a timer and completed the whole thing in about 100 minutes. Many of the negative reviews of this product are related to how hard it is to build. FALSE NEWS. Well, at least if you're like us and have dozens of Ikea products in your home (in fact, thinking this through has made me curious exactly how many Ikea products we've built over the years--I may do a future post on that very topic). So starting from "carrying the boxes upstairs" to "just have to add the sheets and pillows" was, for us at least, a pretty smooth process. The kids even "helped" (which really means it probably took longer than it needed to).

I guess I'll spend a few minutes on the details. First, as always with Ikea stuff, we skimmed the instructions. This bed can be built a few different ways, with the enclosed bed part as a loft, like this, or on the bottom. So we had to make sure we followed the relevant instructions. There was one other key part to the KURA that wasn't clear at the store and was a fabulous discovery to make once we started assembling--we could put the ladder on any side we wanted! This was great! In fact, as I'll discuss later, thinking that we could not do this was one reason that we were considering other options at the store.  It did means that we had to make sure we paid careful attention to the page number as we were building.

So here we go--lay out all the pieces and start looking for the first ones we need.

A drill with a hex set is really key to staying sane. Those little hand cranks only lead to cramped hands, un-tightened screws, and angry people.

In the case of KURA, the mattress slats (of which there are many) are held in place with a track that involved drilling many many screws into the frame. Again, we could not have done this quickly and sanely without a drill. We learned also that a battery-operated drill is helpful so that you're not tethered to an electrical cord.

Ta-dah! Several months later, the Big Kid loves it and the Little Kid loves having the blue bed as a hand-me-down. It took some creative planning (again, more on that later) to make sure it could all fit where it needed to, but we couldn't be happier. Plus the KURA is low enough that we parents can easily reach in and assist when needed (and make the bed--I truly have no idea how I would change the sheets on a full-height bunk bed). Big Kid is a Big Kid but she still needs plenty of snuggles, late-night drinks, or trips to the bathroom. I'd say something like "we're now all sleeping on Ikea beds" but we already have been for years! It's just that one of them was a crib, until now.

More next time on why we chose the bed we did and maybe a quick tally of all our Ikea builds over the years. I feel like we should start charging royalties!