Sooo.. in our most destructive hack to date - Sarah decided that she liked the look of the MANDAL bed from Ikea (below) which has drawers on both sides. However, she wanted the boys to have a single one each, which is not an option from the store. Cue two days of DIY which involved cutting a bed into (almost) half and then rebuilding both sections so that they are stable!
The Original
Stage 1
Basically lay all the pieces of the main frame out and mark the half way point with an offset of about an inch (I haven't been able to switch back to cm yet after living in the US!) so that one half will still go together fairly easily.
Stage 2
Cut everything down the middle with your new jigsaw (a great purchase I must say!) and then proceed to follow the instructions as far as possible to build the frame. In the picture below I have already notched the middle piece of wood and added a new beam to the top bed. The bottom one is made from the original Ikea pieces.
Reinforce joints which are no longer held together as Ikea intended, in the left picture I have added a small bracket and a piece of wood for stability to the leg on the original bed half. On the right hand side you can see the rather more extensive rebuilding of the centre beam on the other half of the bed.
Stage 4
At this point some of you who are good at maths might want to point out that half a double bed is not as wide as a single bed. So this is where you extend those bed halves using particle board supported by repurposed pallets which have been re-assembled and cut to height. Oh yes, and of course you've cut all of the bed struts in (almost) half to fit each bed:
