IKEA bunk / Kura ‘hack’ and children’s bedroom style 

Following on from how to decorate your children’s bedrooms, I thought I would share some of the things that worked out well when we were decorating our daughters’ (4 and 2) bedroom.

I had all 3 of the older children sharing a room together in our UK terraced house – in a bunk bed and a toddler bed – to make space for a playroom and office in the other upstairs rooms. But in Canada we have a bit more space and we’ve separated them. All that to say, when we first decided on a bunk, I wanted a bunk bed but I didn’t want it to be huge – especially as,with a 2 year old and another soon-to-be-toddler, anything particularly high sounded like a very Bad Plan.

Enter the IKEA Kura bed, intended as a cabin sleeper or – reversible – low bed with a sort of four-poster effect.

I thought, with a low mattress underneath, this could make a nice and compact bunk, but thought it looked pretty IKEA-ish, until I stumbled across some ideas like these:

I did intend on painting the frame white along these lines:

But then once we had the fabric on I quite liked the wood and also felt like it was getting a little over-complicated to start painting as well as covering the panels with fabric (that is, I couldn’t convince my husband to paint it and obviously I wasn’t about to do it). Anyway I was quite pleased with how it turned out, the children love it and it looks quite lovely –

A close-up on the fabric:

And no major incidents yet, although my toddler is demonstrating here the need for low beds quite nicely:

It was very easy too – I would recommend a fairly random print if you are going the fabric route as anything too geometric may cause some headaches with matching up patterns etc.

The bottom bunk is just an IKEA foam mattress on slats and having spent many nights curled up there on the edge, it is actually fairly comfortable – definitely a step up from the toddler bed, anyway.

For the rest of the room… I wanted low shelving the width of one wall so my husband very kindly put these up –

And I spent a while on a hunt for a good rug that wasn’t too girly but was still, well, a bit girly…

And was quite pleased with this cotton rug, from Urban Outfitters – they have a really nice selection of flat weave rugs that I think work well in children’s rooms. I was tempted by a fluffier rug but decided it might get in the way of games – plus also not sure I fancied cleaning the occasional yet inevitable wee out of a shag rug.

Here it is again –

And a close-up:

Obviously it needs an underlay and given that it’s cotton I am not sure it will have the staying power of a wool rug but I felt for a children’s room that might be entirely appropriate.

Girls room – nearly there. Check back for some other children’s room ideas soon, once I have gently encouraged my son to pick up the Lego currently distributed across his room so that I can take a photo or two…

tMatM x