There are families that eat together, vacation together and live together. And then there are families who sleep in one enormous IKEA bed together — seven nights a week.
Elizabeth and Tom Boyce of Plano, Texas are parents to five little children — and owners of one enormous seven-person bed. Prior to building the bed, the couple write on their blog, “bedtime was full of tears and fights.” Between anxious kids and Tom’s disability, which keeps him up at night, the two decided to prioritize sleep over privacy.
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The bed has produced big results. As active travelers, the Boyces often share one big hotel room or camper bed with their family. Prior to the bed, they’d have to “retrain” the kids to sleep independently, but now, the pressure is off.
“Our main goal it to travel with our children and show them the world, but we need to fit in small spaces,” Elizabeth told Mashable by email.
To make the bed, the couple traveled deep into the bowels of the IKEA universe. Since IKEA currently doesn't retail family-sized beds, they simply combined standard parts of an IKEA bed to make a kingdom-sized bed, with separate surfaces and corners for each of the five kids.
Since making a big bed, the couple has seen a drastic improvement. “In our house, by moving everyone into one room, we suddenly had several other rooms that were completely empty at night,” the family writes. “And we no longer had small children wandering, crying into our bed in the dark.”
