Girls' Project - The Making of a Daybed

My sister and her baby are coming for a visit next month and it's been weighing on my mind that we don't actually have anywhere for her to sleep.  I've been considering all the options (from our inflatable bed to displacing Thing 1 and Thing 2 for a week) and I haven't liked any of them.

One thing I have been liking, however, is this PB knock-off daybed from Knock-off Wood.  That little beauty has been hopping around in my brain for several weeks now.  I've been trying to figure out the best place to put something like that, but there were really only a few options:

• The office - that idea was nixed immediately. Our office is crammed full of stuff and we didn't want to lose the use of our computers whenever anyone visited (even if that is a rare occurrence)
• The living room - there is technically room there to put in a sleeper sofa, but there are huge windows out to our front porch. There would be no privacy at all.  
• The play room - Dingdingdingding! The room is also cramped, but it has a door and a closet and it's right next to a bathroom.

Here's the room in question.  It's a bit messy now (as it usually is) and we'd have to do some serious purging to make sure this room is still pleasant after the addition of a bed.  I'm thinking the bed would go under the window:

Once that decision was made in my head, I continued to ruminate for another week or two.  Yesterday I decided it was high time to stop thinking about it and start doing it!  I grabbed Thing 2 and told her my idea and showed her the pictures.  She was mildly interested, but when I told her I wanted it to be a project that we did together, she lit up! 

We got to work figuring out our supplies list then headed over to our local hardware store to buy some wood!  We ended up getting three sheets of very nice 4' x 8' birch plywood and, while it probably would have fit into our van uncut, we decided to have the nice people there do some of the large cuts for us (so we wouldn't have too!).  That turned out to be a stroke of good luck because the cuts we did at home took forever!  We were definitely following the measure twice, cut once formula (though it was more like measure four times, cut once).  We wanted to make sure our boxes were perfectly square, so we were very careful.

Once the wood was cut, it was time for the girls to get involved.  They already knew how to glue, but I believe this is the first time they'd ever used a drill to drill holes or screw something together.

By the end of the day, we had one of the boxes put together (the bed is just going to be three boxes, all screwed together) and, I must say, it looks very nice!

It was also very nice to be able to work on a project with the girls.  Sometimes, when I'm working on a big project, they'll complain that I'm always busy, so it was a good thing to be able to include them on this.

Of course, now I have to wait until they get home from school before I can do anymore work on it!