One Room Challenge Week 7 | Beds, Beams, and Bumpers
The Fall One Room Challenge is almost over and Benji’s room refresh is almost done!
The biggest change since the last update is Benji’s bed, which, to be completely honest has been a bit of a saga on multiple fronts.
When we built the bed, Benji was home and insisted on helping (mostly by bringing screws over and taking turns climbing the ladder). He was so proud of helping and is pretty sure he’s a master builder now. The next day he even had Denis read him the bed frame’s instruction manual as a bed time story.
Overall, I’ve been so disappointed in this bed frame.
Most of the wood beams that came have a green tint to them, but that’s the least of my problems with it. The tip of one of the screws is sticking out of a beam. In two or three places we couldn’t drill in screws because they hit other screws in attached beams.
I held off on reaching out to the Etsy vendor because I didn’t know what they could or would do (they don’t accept returns). But since I was writing a post on this and planned to talk about how I didn’t like the bed, I figured I should give him a chance to make it right. A few minutes after I reached out to him with my concerns, he got back to me and told me that the green wood would turn to light brown over time and, more importantly, that we had assembled the bed incorrectly. D’oh!
So now I know what we’ll be doing this weekend.
As for how Benji adjusted to his new bed… well, I should have expected that changing mattresses and changing bed frames would throw a toddler off, but for some reason that wasn’t on my radar.
We ordered a Saatva mattress for him, which turns out to be a sponsor of the One Room Challenge, though I didn’t know that when I ordered it for him. We got the mattress a few weeks before we built the bed and the bigger mattress was a major change for him. Even though it was comfy, he asked several times to have his old, little mattress back. I felt so bad that if I could have switched the house bed frame to a toddler bed size, I probably would have sent back the new mattress and just kept the old one, but that wasn’t an option so we had to press on.
We had a lot of sleeping problems the first few nights, but I did a bit of research and learned that toddlers basically want their beds to be like little nests. I added a bumper to each side and put a pillow at the foot of his bed under his sheets, and those changes have made him feel much more comfortable, which has helped his sleep and ours—when a two year-old can’t sleep, no one else gets to sleep.
As for the bed frame, well, he wouldn’t sleep in it at first. Then we put a quilt on top as a roof, which he liked. But after a few nights, he decided he still needed to see his ship that hangs from the ceiling, so we folded the quilt back a bit. Then we bought some sheer fabric samples at Mood to see what would look good as sort of curtains on top of the bed (to look a bit like this), but now, we’ve finally arrived at sleeping in the bed without anything on top of it. Oof—What a roller coaster!
Before next Thursday’s reveal, I’ve still got a few things left to take care of:
Install new bookshelves
Hang picture frame above Benji’s dresser
Hem curtains (or, more realistically, get curtains hemmed)
Paint where I patched the drywall
We seem to have the world’s thinnest drywall; it gets dented and dinged so easily! So while I was patching holes from Benji’s previous bookshelf, I also patched a few other dents and dings, and those spots need a fresh coat of paint.
The builder of the home was also our original landlord for this place and he told me the white paint color they used was Swiss Coffee, so I bought a gallon of that. Well, either the original paint color is not Swiss Coffee or the batch I bought is so off from Swiss Coffee that it seems like a totally different shade of white. So I’ll have to take a bit of paint off the wall and bring it into the store for color matching.
But we’re almost done and I can’t wait to share just how awesome his room is with you guys!
