Drum Roll...The bunk beds are D O N E!

Ta Dah! The day has finally come where I can show you the completed pictures. We now have a finished bunk bed in the kid's room. WOO HOO! They love it, and I love it! And those my friends are two wonderful feats! I am so glad to have this project done and now feel like I can move on to my next venture (which happens to be another painstaking process). Yep, you guessed it...that darn recliner. It is not going to defeat me people I AM GOING TO finish it, and it is going to be yet another fantabulous piece. But for now I get to reveal to you the beautiful bunk bed that I am so proud of. Again I got the plans for this bed off of Knock off Wood. And if you haven't checked out her blog yet you'd better get to it! It is awesome!

Here are the beds...

This is a picture I took before we put the sheet of wafer wood down so you could see the extra supports we added that were not in the original plans.

And here they are with the cute bedding the kids picked out on our "special" trip to Target. They were so proud to be able to pick out their VERY OWN bedding. I love how they both match the bed perfectly! And just you wait til I finish a little something for the bottom bunk. It is going to be sawweet!

I had someone who had a few questions on the details of building the bunkbeds and thought that it was good information to anyone else out there who might be considering this project.

This was her question: "Love the beds!! We are going to build those for my boys this month as well. We even have the same car bedding from Target! So my question to you is, what type of paint did you use, and any words of advice before we begin our project? Also what was the estimated cost?"
Thanks

Well, The paint we used was first, one gallon of gray primer I used almost the entire gallon so I just tossed the can after I was done. It is waaaay easier to make a dark color cover up a gray than it is a white! Then the red is Barn Red from Martha Stewart. I got both at home depot.

We attached our bunks differently than the plans say to because we wanted the option to take them apart and use them as separate beds in the future so in the 4X4 posts we used a paddle bit and inserted a 1 inch dowel with some wood glue. If you look at the post I did right before the finished product post you can see the dowels sticking up out of the 4X4's. Then we just slid the top bunk pieces into place. While assembling the bed our saving grace were some wooden furniture clamps.  Also I highly recommend either a drill press or a drill guide when drilling the holes for the lag screws that hold the frame to the headboards. We had the unfortunate experience of having to postpone assembling it and had to redrill everything from the other side of the headboards and make our holes bigger because drilling them by hand made the lag screws go in crooked and started to crack the siderails.  YIKES! So I highly recommend that.

We also invested in an electric paint sprayer for this project and it was HEAVEN! I did hand paint the primer on because it is supposed to be thick and won't go through the sprayer but when it came time for the red my husband thinned the paint with some water and it worked great! I just followed him around with a brush to get the texture right and get rid of the orange peel texture that the sprayer made. It saved a ton of time though. We did two coats of red and one gallon was plenty. I still have some left over which is good because while assembling there were some goofs and I have some touch up to do.

Oh and one more thing. Make sure when you drill the 4X4's into the head board pieces you space your screws so that your lag screws that you'll be using to assemble the finished bed don't run into them. That too was a tough lesson learned for us. We had to do some digging for hidden screws which was NOT fun. And it made for more touch up later.

As for the cost, to be honest I lost count. My husband would be best to answer that question. I'll have to ask him and get back to you.