One of the most commonly asked questions we get is where we got the Jenny Lind bed in our sons room, so I figured a quick post about it was needed! It’s often assumed that we purchased the bed from the Land of Nod or another retailer, but we actually purchased the bed off Kijiji for less than $100 and refinished it ourselves.

When we first bought the bed it was in its original state, was missing a spool and was badly damaged in many spots. The frame of the bed was also cracked so it needed to be reinforced on the bottom. The original owner had also waxed and oiled the frame.

Since the bed had been damaged and was missing a spool, we knew we had to do something to it. Rather than trying to sand and stain the bed, not knowing how it would react since it had been waxed and oiled, we decided to sand and paint it. Our original choice was a high gloss, but we decided on a satin finish since high gloss tends to show more finger prints and marks than a lower sheen.

We found an old chair at a second hand store that had the exact same spindles as the bed and took one of the spindles off the chair for the bed frame.

The original frame has slats, but those were missing so we needed something to support the mattress.  We bought a large piece of plywood to act as a base for the mattress and reinforced the frame with extra screws. We chose to spray the bed, rather than use a brush to paint it, but either would work just fine. We went with a true black colour, as I didn’t want the black to have any colour tint to it.

I’ll go over how we did the bed rails in another post, as we custom designed those for the bed and added them on. The best part is that they can be easily removed when we’re not using them anymore, and/or painted another colour if we want to use them on another bed at some point.

You can often find this style of bed in thrift stores, antique shops and online. If you’re willing to put in the work, they can look fantastic.

If you have any other questions about the bed or how we finished it, just leave a comment below and I’ll do my best to answer!

Melissa