From The Flickr Pool: A Beautiful Wheelchair-Accessible Crib
By Chuck Cage
TM reader and photo pool member Swamp0808 — that’s him with his father in the picture) posted this photo (and others) of a special crib he made for a wheelchair-bound cousin who had trouble leaning over a regular crib to pick up the baby. He started with an existing crib, then added a ton of modifications to come up with what you see above. Check out the Toolmonger photo pool for lots more pictures of the build, as well as comments on each one describing the work.
If you have the time, spin over to Flickr, sign up, join the Toolmonger group, and add some of your photos to the TM pool. We’d love to see your latest tools, projects, or even some pics of your shop.
Note: Have all these photos of everyone’s work inspired you to spend more time in the shop lately? They have for me. Every time I think, “I’m too busy for that,” I take a look at the photo pool and get excited and inspired all over again.
The Toolmonger Photo Pool [Flickr]
June 15th, 2007 at 11:51 am
I saw this earlier this week - great project.. and it looks like they thought of everything… Even have piano hinges on the doors (so as not to pinch little fingers) instead of the more common double hinge (one at top and one at bottom) like you see on most closet doors - on which this seems to be based - at least the open/close mechanism. My wife would love this.. she’s complaining because now that our 14 month old is a bit older/taller we’ve had to lower the crib all the way down. Having the crib at this height would be great.. no leaning over. But then I would remind her to be thankful she can lean over.
So what happens when the kid is old enough to climb over the rails? I still have scars from when I figured that one out.
June 15th, 2007 at 8:22 pm
Beautiful work. As Rick just implied, even those of us who aren’t in wheelchairs could benefit from some serious redesign on the classic crib.
(this written by someone whose back is fiercely complaining right now from 20 minutes of pat/hum/pat/hum, bending over a crib with my cranky overtired teething grandbaby)
And Rick, I know what you’re saying about what to do when the kid is old enough to climb over the rails. I guess the appropriate answer is a toddler bed, but I’ve known plenty of kids who still need more containment than that. Unfortunately, for every person who think it’s shocking and demeaning to have a toddler attached to a “leash”/strap so that s/he can have some freedom to roam without risking running into traffic or disappearing intoa crowd, there will be fifty who would consider it inhumane to put a top on a crib to keep a monkey-baby (like my granddaughter!) from climbing out. She can’t - yet. But lord knows she tries hard enough, and she can’t even walk yet!
June 19th, 2007 at 6:19 pm
So we had to take out the crib when Sam got too big and started acting like he was going to climb out. We considered rigging up an additional fence around the top up to the ceiling, but he was doing well and was able to transition to a toddler bed with a smaller rail. Piano hinges was Pop’s idea and they worked really well. We had to improvise a slider in the track system and ended up with a plastic “pin” that fit into the bottom rail at the end of each door.
Thanks for the comments, we searched the internets for a while to see if there were any other crib ideas out there for wheelchair access and only found really expensive stuff.
We used a regular crib and the rail off an old crib to work this together, it was a lot of fun figuring out the details and putting it together.
Sam’s parents actually painted a tree on the wall behind the crib for a great treehouse effect.