Verandah Chair from Bunk Bed

As found and as photographrd on my flip phone.  2 bunk beds free to good home in Airey's Inlet

Bed with the head and end removed

This was the only branding I could find on the beds

Done!

Here is a bit of construction detail.

Side view.

With cushions on the verandah.

Hi

A few weeks ago, during Easter, my family spotted some bunk beds out the front of a house which were "free to good home".  The house happened to be one my parents had owned, and the beds were ones my brother and I had slept in when growing up, maybe from ages 8 to 24.  So I was curious about the beds, and went to have a look at them on my trike, and then when I decided it was worth doing something with them, went and got them in the car.

My first thought for the bunks was to make a chair out of them, and I spent a fair while looking at the bed head, working out how they could be narrowed to make a single chair.  It all seemed a bit complicated,  but after a while I thought "oh, that would not really be necessary, if I just kept the heads roughly as they are, it could be a 2 person wide chair".  So this became the plan.  It happened we had some 40 x 40 cm cushions from Lincraft and I used these as a template for making the double chair.

Working out what to do was probably the hardest part of the building process, and once I'd decided on that, the rest just sort of followed.  The bed rails were shortened dramatically, and the cut and drilling pattern of the head end of the rails were put into the foot end.  A few chairs were measured for height, and then I worked out how to replicate that height in the chair by sawing and drilling the head and foot.  Then it was all reassembled and the boss (my wife Christine) had said she wanted arm rails, so this was taken into account.

The arms took a bit of time, I used 12 x 20 dressed all round timber from Porta via Demar as a scaffold for the arms, and except for screws, this was the only part of the chair that didn't come from a bunk.  The whole thing is done now, including a cushion change from red and green to brown and blue dictated by Christine. 

So that is one chair done, but I picked up 2 bunks from the dumpster pile, so I plan to make another twin chair within a few weeks.  Our son Ewan made a small table in high school and he no longer wants it so maybe bits of that will end up in the MKII chair.  I will report on that when it happens.

Regards

Steve Nurse