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.