bedside cots and cosleeping

[blooblies]

I'm expecting #3 and after discovering cosleeping with #2 I'd like to again but with even less getting out of bed involved. I used to try and lift her into her crib when fast asleep so I could stretch out a bit and also to give DH some room in our stanadrd double bed.

Having looked into bedside cots I am at the price of them, even on ebay and thinking there must be a cheaper way! I am not expecting the cosleeping phase to be very extended (both dc were in their own room by 3-4 months due to their flailing arms outgrowing the crib and the cotbed not being able to fit in our room) so I really don't want to be forking out unneccessary £.

Has anyone come up with any good solutions? My existing crib is about 16cm too short of the mattress (ours is about 60cm from the floor) so I wouldn't feel happy about taking off a side and balancing it on goodness knows what.

Saw the legs of your bed?

Yes there is, we got a second hand cot of Ebay. one with a drop side, removed the drop side and put it inn the corner of our room with the double bed right up to it. Lucky one of the fight settings was the perfect fight for our bed but, DH would have been happy to drill some new holes to get the night right if need be. We just need to pad the cot on the far side so the matures was pushed right upto ours.

We only have a stand double and this has give us Lotta of room. DS still sleeps in it now at 21 months as there is a lot of space.

I bought my bedside cot from Preloved - after a very lengthy and comprehensive search of all the second hand websites that lasted some considerable time! I think if you are still pregnant, it might be worth giving it say a month (if you have that long) and keeping eyes out on preloved, gumtree, ebay etc until something comes up.

Mothercare have one for £150, or the Ikea Gulliver cot has one removable side and so might work. There are quite a few on Preloved too - seems to be less popular than ebay so pricing might be better on there?

Or how would it be to store your bed somewhere and just have the mattress on the floor with your cotbed mattress beside it?

We bought a cot from kiddicare in the sale for about £40 (mattress was about the same) and it was 10 inches lower than our bed. We bought some wood and built a platform (kind of like a kid's play stage) for it to stand on. It's against the wall and I bought some beaded wood to put around the top to stop it wobbling off. The cot now stands level with the bed. We kept one side off for a few months and put it back on about 2 weeks ago, the transition was surprisingly smooth. It works for us!

We have some big books stacked up under the legs of the cot
They've been there 19 months now, and not moved an inch :)

I can recommend River Cottage recipe books. Nice and thick.

Thanks for all of the ideas! I looked into the ikea cots but they are still too wide for my tiny bedroom and ikea is miles away from us. My crib is a swinging crib and I am not that confident in the stopper so I've opted to fork out ebay prices for a cosleeper in the hope that I recoup a lot of the outlay when we no longer need the crib. And sell my swinging one too. The unnecessary prices of baby stuff makes me so .

I got a second hand crib of ebay, 20 quid and my dp removed one side and added on wooden feet to bring it up to our bed level. Worked brilliantly

I bought the saplings space saver cot as, like you, we have very little space alongside our bed. We put it together without the drop side, and I thought we might need to make new holes for the base height, but actually one of the settings turned out to be perfect.