Loft bed upgrade

Materials: Morrum or Robin Loft Bed, towel and kitchen rails, utensil holders

Description: My daughter shares a room with her little brother. The aim of this project was to give her as much storage up in her loft bed as possible, and to keep all her toys/books/clothes within the confines of the loft bed.

I started with a wooden loft bed (I'm unsure if it is a Robin or Morrum - see photo, right). It was too tall, so we sawed about 10 cm off the bottom so it was higher than a bunk bed but with room to sit up/play.

The next step was to prevent the toddler climbing up into the loft bed. This aim was achieved by drilling holes through the top of a destroyed Kurrs chest of drawers and cable-tying them to the ladder (I didn't use screws as the toddler is handy with a screw-driver).

We installed an Ikea towel rail across under the foot of the mattress to hang her clothes.

I installed an Ikea kitchen rail across the bottom side rail of the bed, and attached large and small Ikea kitchen utensil containers to hold big and little shoes. These containers kept being bumped off, so I drilled a hole through the back of the plastic containers and cable-tied them in place (yes, I know I have a bad cable-tie habit, but they do make it easy to re-configure things as the kids grow so fast, and are childproof, at least so far).

To provide storage for books/toys we used sheets of 295 mm wide melamine mounted on angle brackets. They WERE straight before the toddler used them as a climbing frame.

Two hooks for bean bags, and loops to click bike helmets through were later additions.

A 595mm deep piece of melamine mounted on angle brackets serves as a desk (with a Jansjo light clipped above). The fit ball does double duty as a desk chair and a toy.

A 295mm deep melamine shelf above provides extra book storage in bed, so she has a spot to hide from her brother with books and toys to hand.

Lastly I installed a smoke alarm BELOW the mattress near the desk (and light). I was concerned that if something caught fire under the bed and it would take too long for the smoke to rise above the mattress and reach the ceiling smoke detector.

I've been very careful not to put any hooks or protrusions outside the bed high up - it is essential that if a child falls over the edge they don't get caught/hung/strangled on the way down.

~ KBarker