After 25 years ...we have a bedroom set

A little later this month, Shirley and I will celebrate our 25th wedding anniversary. Aside from having an odd time of it comprehending that we could possibly be old enough for that (although, truth be told, we were married when we were each 3 years old) ...we have never had a bedroom furniture set. We've always had a good mattress, but it was typically on a metal frame or plywood, and the 'nightstands' for many years were simply speakers (I was a musician before becoming a geek, so we had speakers that were a convenient height). Well, as an anniversary gift to ourselves, we went to the local Kane's store and bought a set. We love the design, and overall the pieces are built quite well. But there have been some issues.

One of the guys delivering / installing the set said that they always have problems putting this set together. Rather that place a call to their service department (we'd have to wait days for them to come out) I decided we would fix this ourselves ...and do a better job than they would have anyway. I've annotated the pic to describe the issue with the side rails.

Each of the 3 slats that go across the bottom have one vertical support in the middle. There are supposed to be 2 inserts with threads to accommodate screws that fasten the board above to the vertical support. But those parts were missing, so the guys left it like this. That doesn't look too secure to me; what do you think?

We went back to the store to see about getting the missing hardware (I brought the screws with me) and they gave us some pieces that did have the correct thread size. But they were not the right pieces, and after measuring, we saw that even if they did work, the vertical supports would, at their max height, still be 1/2 inch too short. So again, we decided to do it better ourselves. I picked up some furniture leg brackets, affixing each of them with 4 screws to give us 2 supports per slat, rather than just one. I also picked up some hardwood furniture legs to fit the brackets, cut them to fit, screwed them into the brackets, and have them each resting on a caster on the floor. This is now a sturdy bed.

Oh yeah, and the wood on part of one of the footboard posts is broken. We documented that before the guys left, but the solution from Kane's is for them to order a new footboard. It's been just over a week, so I'll call tomorrow and get an update. The damage is strictly cosmetic rather than structural, so it's ok until the replacement comes.

This is a blurry pic, but it shows part of the latches on the armoire. They were bent beyond functioning when delivered, so again I decided that we could do a better job ourselves. I've replaced the latches on the armoire with magnetic latches top and bottom, and have now removed the dental floss that we'd been using to keep the doors closed.

But overall ...we really like this set. Shirley used her creativity and sewing prowess to find some awesome fabric at $6 a yard and make a bedspread and matching sham (which I've learned is a fancy word for pillow). We also decided that this shade of green on the walls is more relaxing than the purple that we'd first tried. This, to us, truly looks like Florida. It was worth the wait :)