We near the end of our time anticipating baby, and Jen is eager for the wait to be over.

This week's guerilla carpentry project was a pair of blocks to raise one end of the spare bed so that Jen can sleep on an incline and relieve the swelling in her ankles. She has not suffered from much puffiness, but it's been getting more persistent over this last stage. So we were advised to lift the foot of the bed.

The advice we were given was to lift the foot of the bed about a foot (30cm), but that sounded very high so I decided to start by making blocks that would be about six inches (15cm) tall. We had some waste wood from a deck project that was about six inches wide, so I made the blocks out of two widths of that timber with a piece of 2x4 in between. This left enough wood to make two more blocks to lift the bed to 12 inches if need be.

The clever bit is that that I made the blocks so that they would stack. The 2x4 middle piece is not flush with the top but sticking up about a quarter of an inch (6mm). There is also a brace piece on the end which ensures that the block does not collapse and which acts as an end stop for a stacked block, and a foot stop screwed into the top so that the bed leg doesn't skid around.

They're pretty sturdy, but they are already under the bed and covered in toe-stub-preventive padding so not really available for a picture at this time. Maybe once the baby's here.

Anyway, the six inch blocks are quite enough of an incline. I can't sleep at that angle at all because it makes my congestion so bad, but Jen woke up this morning with considerably less puffy ankles so it seems to have been a success.

As with the birthing stool though, this is one of those things that I would probably do better next time, but I used the timber we had to hand and only took an hour to hack the blocks together. I'm just glad they're not wobbly.

Posted by Dunx at July 13, 2005 09:31 AM