My husband built this toddler bed for our 18-month old son, who decided very recently to become a proficient crib climber! He built it over the course of a about a month, just working on it on the weekends. He made a few changes to Ana White's plans. He followed the measurements on this blog as our toddler mattress was wider than her plans allowed for: http://janaebeth.blogspot.com/2010/05/pictures-of-bed-and-pictures-of-w….
Other changes to Ana White's plans? He bought 2x2's for the legs, and chiseled out spaces as large as what Ana had you attach a second smaller piece of wood to create. This made the legs more sturdy and attractive.
He also doweled all the headboard and footer vertical boards together to keep them from warping.
He used small nails, and made sure to tap them in with a nail setter, and then puttied them so you can't see any nails in his work. He puttied all other visible cracks and spaces in the wood, and then sanded it all down.
He sanded the corners of the footer down a bit so that they would be a bit more forgiving if our son ran into one of them.
My husband did make the arch for the bed. He did this marking dots on the highest and lowest points of the arch on the piece of wood we were going to cut. I held a piece of thin rope attached to a pencil a foot away, while my husband pulled it taught and drew an arch that followed his dots. He then just cut along the line very carefully, and sanded well.
He put all the slats that Ana recommended on the bed, contrary to some advice given in the comments section, as he wanted it to be as sturdy as possible. This was a good choice as they moment we brought the finished bed into our son's room, he started to jump on his new bed.
We are very happy with the finished product. We could have bought a cheap Wal-mart plastic ugly thing for the amount we spent on our beautiful solid wood toddler bed. So glad we went the DIY route. Thank you, Ana White!
