How to Turn an Old Baby Crib Into a Storage Bench

Ever since my little brother was trustworthy enough not to roll out of bed, our crib has been collecting dust in the cold basement. Due to my mom's many attached memories to the small infant sized bed, dad and I had not been able to coax her into chucking it. So eventually, dad threw out the idea of turning it into something else which seemed to catch our mom's attention. After many brainstorming sessions, mom and dad decided that converting the crib into a bench would be our best option to clear some room in the basement while also keeping the sentiments of the old crib.

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Step 1: Materials/Tools

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Step 2: Disassembling the Crib

Depending on what state your crib is in, you might have to disassemble and remove all of the old parts, but I think this part kinda comes without saying it.

Step 3: Box Framing

Depending on what type of crib you have, you might actually be able to make your bench seat completely out of your crib. Ours, on the other hand, did not come with enough lumber to create our seat. So instead we picked up some 2 x 6s from Menards and ripped them down to some strips that were about 1" in width. Then we cut four other pieces into 4' long boards and six strips into 15" pieces. Then all we did was glue and screw all of these pieces together to form the framework of our bench top.

Step 4: Bench Walls

This part is really straightforward. All we did to form our sides, was grab a sheet of 3/8" plywood and rip out the pieces for all of our sides. However, we did break up our top into 4 separate pieces. 3 to surround our door and 1 for the actual door. As you can imagine, the side pieces all needed their own rails to support them next to the mainframe.

Step 5: Door Construction

Since the main piece of plywood was more crooked than a tree root, we had to make 3 cleats for the bottom so that we could form it into a somewhat straight shape. As an additional precautionary measure, we clamped it straight overnight to ensure that it would retain its shape.

Step 6: Attaching the Side Rails

Once again, how you attach your rails is all dependent on what type of crib you own. For the sides of our bench, we cut the header and footer of the bed down a couple of inches so that their height could be somewhat proportionate to the rest of the bench. Also, with the added height of the cushions, none of our legs were touching the ground!

Step 7: Attaching the Front Rail

For the front of our bench, we decided to use the remaining sides of the crib to decorate the face. Since the altitude of our bench was much smaller than our side piece we ran it through our table-saw to cut all of the bars down to the right size. Then we removed the pegs from the other half so that we could reattach the former bottom rail to the other side so that it would look like a miniature crib guard.

Step 8: Making the Back-Rest

To get the angle of our back-rest correct, we ripped another board off of our 2 x 6 and placed a screw on each end so that we could still adjust the angle of the back before we screwed it down.

Step 9: Sanding/Priming

Now we are going to come right out and say that neither of us are very fond of painting. But in this instance sanding our old rails down and priming them before we applied our paint was a must because of how old the materials were. After our primer was finished drying, we then went back over everything with a latex based white paint. If we had it available, we would have used an oil-based paint to finish it off but at the time all we had was latex.