Simple No-Sew Bunk Bed Tent

Try this easy no-sew bunk bed tent trick next time your little one wants to use all your sheets and blankets to build a fort out of their bed.

One of my daughters is a burrower. Do you know a kid like this? She likes to pile up all her stuffed animals on her bed and sleep right in the middle of them.

If you’re ever looking for her, you can bet she’s hiding somewhere under a sheet tent in the den or behind our overstuffed chair reading a book with about 3 or 4 of her animals.

A Cute but Messy Problem

She’s also an engineer-in-the-making. If you’re on Instagram with me, you may have seen the picture I posted recently of her invention that allows her to turn her light off and on from her bed. (When you’re cuddled up with all your stuffies, the last thing you want to do is crawl out of bed, turn off the light, and then race the monsters back across the room to the bed!)

So I wasn’t surprised when I came in the other morning to find this.

It may be a little hard to tell from the picture, but she raided the linen closet, draped sheets and sleeping bags from the top bunk, anchored them with rolls of yarn, and made herself a colorful little bunk bed tent.

Now, I respect a girl’s right to the perfect little reading hideaway, but I just couldn’t deal with a bed that looked like the villain from a luxury bedding horror movie. I mean, it looks like the swamp thing, with sheets instead of watery goo!

Plus, we have no more spare sheets now. I couldn’t bear to tell her to take it down, so I had to come up with a more mommy-approved version of the tent. After a few failed attempts, I hit on an amazingly simple trick.

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Bunk Bed Tent Solution

In trying to solve this dilemma, I sacrificed a couple of hours and a perfectly good bed sheet before I realized that all I would need is:

• A twin-size flat sheet
• 4-ply Jute string
• Command “Fridge” Clips

I picked up two packages of the fridge clips from my local Hobby Lobby, otherwise known as “My Happy Place”, and applied them upside down at about 12 inch intervals around the upper bed frame.

Then I simply cut the jute string to a little more than the length of the bed and tied a knot in each end. I folded the bed sheet in half lengthwise, and inserted the string along the fold.

Then I gently pushed the sheet and string into the clips.

In case you’re wondering why the string is necessary, I found that the sheet alone was too thin to be securely held by the clip. But once you put the string in the fold, it fills up that little loop at the top of the clip and is much harder to pull out.

Plus, tying a knot at the end keeps it from slipping out of each corner. You can probably use any kind of string that you have on hand, as long as it’s small enough to fit in that loop, but not too small to pull through.

For the end of the bed, I used part of the other sheet that gave its life for an earlier, failed, prototype. You could probably use a pillowcase too, if that’s handier.

The beauty of this method is that it can all be removed, with no trace! So if she ever outgrows her bunk bed tent, I can just take down the sheet. I can leave the clips up because they’re almost invisible, but once we’re really done with them, they’ll pull right off cleanly, with no mess to clean up and no damage to the furniture.

I also relocated her lamp cord, just to clean things up a little bit. Doesn’t it look pretty with her light on inside?

I’m sure she won’t mind if I make myself at home with a good book while she’s at school! I’m off to play Goldilocks…