IKEA MYDAL Bunk Bed Ladder Hack

This project felt like a bit of a stretch for my DIY skills but it actually turned out to be quite attainable, so I’m very proud of myself for trying it.

So to recap, I got the IKEA MYDAL bunk bed for free from a friend. My girls had been asking for a bunk bed for months so when I saw one up for grabs for free I couldn’t resist. It wasn’t the style of bed I was looking for but I figured with a little tweaking we could make it much better.

My daughter tried out the ladder that it came with for a few days and confirmed that it was hard to climb for a kid that is a little bit afraid of heights and kinda painful on the soles of your feet. As IKEA goes it’s very space-saving but not the most comfortable to climb.

So I set to Pinterest searching for some tutorials on how to make a slanted ladder that took up minimal space.

The best tutorial I found was this one by Plank And Pillow. I altered it a bit to fit my specifications for the room but basically, followed their steps. I changed the angle that the ladder slopes at to 10 degrees instead of 15 and I just screwed the boards into place rather than routering a groove for them. I went to home depot and got 3 – 3″ wide x 6′ long pine planks for about $15 total to build the ladder.

Now originally I was just going to screw this ladder into place over the original one but one day I was staring at the structure of the bed and had an epiphany and so this Hack was born.

Since the bed is made to accommodate having the ladder at either end and on either side I realized that I could simply remove the “ladder section” from the bed without losing any of the structural integrity of the bedframe. Here’s how I did it.

First I used my tape measure to figure out how far out I wanted the ladder to come out. I basically wanted the smallest angle possible because the whole point of the bunk bed was to give them more room to play so I didn’t want the ladder to have a large footprint.

Next, I removed the sections of the frame that made up the original IKEA ladder. See the image below.

The piece highlighted in yellow is free-standing from the main bedframe and can be removed without losing structural integrity. The piece highlighted in purple I then moved over to attach to the side rail and support where the yellow ladder piece was before. I also removed the piece highlighted in green simply because I wanted a more streamlined style. If you have really wild children I would keep this for extra support but my girls are pretty easy on furniture so I figured we’d be fine.

(p.s I’m writing this tutorial 2 months after doing this and it’s still perfectly structurally sound.)

The purple piece now supports the guardrail and with the yellow piece gone, you can attach your new ladder.

To attach the ladder I added a piece of wood to the back of the ladder and then simply screwed that piece into the frame. See my Instagram Highlight called “Bunk Ladder” for a video step-by-step.

After building the ladder using the Plank and Pillow tutorial I filled the screw holes so that when I painted it would look more professional. If you have a router you can just follow their tutorial to make it a more seamless look but if not screws and wood fill worked perfectly.

The final step was sanding it all smooth and rounding the top edges so it didn’t cause any splinters. I’m so proud of myself for building this!