Bunk bed or loft beds

[Booksandpens]

We need to sort out the children's room, but if we buy the furniture, it has to last until they move out basically. We live in a 2 bed house, so the children are sharing. Same sex so no issue with sharing as teenagers.

At the moment, we have 2 single beds in their room, but we need more storage for clothes. The 2 options I can think of is to get 2 loft beds with wardrobes and desk underneath, or get a bunk bed, freeing up space for more storage where the second bed used to be. I think the loft beds may be useful for longer, but bunk beds are so much cheaper and closer to our preferred budget, so I would like to know if you have experience with either of the beds, and what is the best solution for a room that needs to be shared until they move out?
We've probably got another 12/15 years before that happens so it needs to work long term.
Thanks

I would turn the beds round if they will fit, put the Kallax as a divider down the middle and a nice rug with a desk on one side and a wardrobe or draws on the other. A bit like this...

Most cabin beds have a lot of wasted space and three is def too young for one

When ours were little we took the bottom rungs off the bunk bed ladder so the pre schoolers couldn't climb up. If the 3 year old plays upstairs unsupervised bunk or loft beds are a risk.

RSTera oh, that's an interesting layout, and I think it could work with our current beds, and we could swap our bigger kallax for the smaller one that's currently in their room.

Thanks for all the ideas, I'm already rethinking the whole idea, and we might end up with more floor space by just rearranging everything, especially if we manage to sort out the toys and books.

A little update, we've moved the furniture around to match the layout RSTera suggested. It does look bigger now. We still have far too many clothes or not enough storage for them, so I'll try to sort those out this afternoon.

Surprisingly we actually have enough storage for the toys, the DCs just don't put them away when they've finished playing. That'll have to be a priority to teach them and remind them on a regular basis.

I literally went through the clothes and worked out how many paints, socks, bested, T shirts, trousers, dresses they needed and just kept our favourites. I let them wear their best all the time and got rid of the rest

We put 2 rails in the freestanding wardrobe (prior to built in one) put the youngest one clothing at the top that we could reach down and older child had lower rail. When I washed I hung everything onto hangers that I could and dried it on there then straight into wardrobe. If you are washing several days per week they don't need tonnes of clothes especially the 6 year old in term time.

I have two preteen boys in one bedroom. They have bunkbeds and love them. They agreed on a rule that during the day, as long as the "regular resident" of each bunk is not ON the bunk, it's fair game to hang out on by either boy. There is a curtain rod across the "open" side of the bottom bunk (it's against the wall) so the curtain can be closed making a little den.

We have a 4x2 Kallax upright next to the bed - upper bunk boy has the top 4 squares, lower bunk boy has the bottom 4 squares. Then there is a 4x4 Kallax and 4x2 Kallax (upright) along one wall. The left half upper bunk boy's, while the right half of the boxes are lower bunk boy's. They can tell who owns each "box" as one has blue boxes and one has green. They use these boxes as dresser drawers for clothing, keeping some toys in, and other stuff. They also have room on top for board games and such.

I attached a few jumbo Command hooks on the ends of the Kallax, to use for hanging up clothing or bags or whatever.

Not sure if that helps, but it works great for us.

Loft-wise. Mine isn’t boarded out, but I can put big boxes widthways so they sit across two beams so then i can still store things up there. Would that work as an option? We fitted a proper ladder in the loft, and that way it’s sooo much easier to get things up and down - I would really recommend it.

I haven't been up the loft as our step ladder is too short for me to reach up. We've basically got a few light boxes around the edge of the opening.

We've managed to sort the toys into the kallax, and didn't have to bring the bigger kallax upstairs (luckily, as we would have had to dismantle it to take it up the stairs.)

Still haven't done the clothes. We regularly try to sort them out but they just seem to multiply!

Could you get ottoman style single beds so you can lift up the mattress and store toys for rotation, old clothes waiting for younger one to grow into, out of season items etc? You'd be amazed how much you can get in the space of a bed base!

Wardrobes with drawers could be good for clothes. Ikea sell plenty where you can switch around where the rails and drawers are so you can change them as their needs change.