Improvise, Adapt and Overcome- Crib Assembly

This past weekend we took advantage of Scott's 3 day weekend and drove up to Branson to spend a couple days. This is the second year we have taken the kiddos to Silver Dollar City and it was so much fun! Brooklyn was finally tall enough to be able to ride a lot of the little kid rides. She even rode her first roller coaster! Proud roller coaster loving momma over here!

That's my brave 3 year old and myself in the third car back! You can barely see her head sticking up out of the car. But she did it!

We also took the kids to play mini golf for the first time. It was actually my first time at mini golf too. I was pretty surprised to find I wasn't to shabby either! The kids loved golfing with their own kid sized clubs, but we figured out we were a bit adventurous when we prepaid for 36 holes… At 5 and 3, they would have been good with only doing the first 9 holes. 

Ah well, live and learn!

During our weekend away we had a very small queen bed for myself, my 6 foot 4 inch husband, and our small 7 month old adorable baby. At home we still co-sleep with him, but we have a king so it hasn't been much of an issue. 

I know there are probably a lot of you who share a queen bed with a kid (or maybe even two!), I seriously don't know how you all do it! 

I hardly slept both nights we were out and vowed when we got home we were going to figure out the crib situation.

So yesterday we got out the crib that a friend of ours so graciously gave us! The crib was missing all the screws to attach the panels together. I had called Delta the crib company and inquired about replacement screws. I was told that they no longer carried that crib model and didn't make that particular screw size anymore.

Back to the drawing board I went and called a crib building company I found online that sold crib parts.

This route I actually found the correct screws we needed, but they were going to cost $67 for the screws and an additional $11 for shipping. 

Now I'm not sure if it's just me, but I was pretty sure I could figure something else out for a lot cheaper then $78! 

We still needed a crib mattress too, which was going to be $40 for one at Walmart. So I was pretty determined we could improvise and use different screws for quite a bit less. 

We had one long screw from our friend for an example of what we needed and headed off to the hardware store to see what we could find.

They didn't have the exact screws, but we were just concerned with the size matching up. So we ended up with some hexagon screws and some phillips screws. Because we were working with a tight area we bought an offset phillips screw driver thingy like this one to get in the smaller areas between the bars. It did the job well, not bad for $4!

These were the type of screws we were missing.

And here we have the ones we improvised with! Since they are a shiny silver, I think I may go over them with some dark paint to help them blend in.

Getting home we started assembling the crib and the screws were working perfectly! I was thrilled, we were able to use just cheap 'ol screws from the hardware store! As we continued putting each piece on, 2 of the screws didn't want to go in on the last panel. We knew the screws had to fit since all the others fit into the other areas. I rubbed a q-tip soaked in vegetable oil in the hole and cleaned the threads out. With a little bit of elbow grease (or vegetable grease!), the last panel screws went in.

 We realized we didn't have the four shorter screws to attach the wire frame that holds the mattress. So back to the hardware store hubby went while I wiped down the crib of all the dust from sitting in our garage. 

The shorter screws worked and we had the crib ready for it's little sleeper! After spending around $20 for the screws and $40 for the new mattress, our total on this crib was about $60!
Definitely worth a little research and a couple trips to the hardware store!

Our helpers were excited about the new bed too!

And I think it is already helping our sleep situation, Jude took a 1 1/2 hour nap in it that after noon and slept part of the night in it!
Haha! It may take a few days for the little prince to get used to his new sleeping quarters!

Has anyone else had to improvised while building or fixing a piece of furniture to save a few bucks?