Hanleys Big Girl Bed

I almost made it 4 years of Hanley confined in a crib! In August, I finally started sanding down the chipped paint on Hanleys big girl bed.
Hanleys big girl bed was my bed when I was her age. 💗 It was my princess bed and had a canopy overhead. I shockingly have majority of the pieces to the bed that my parents kept for all these years. It would have been much easier to just go spend the money on a new bed for Hanley but this bed is special to me and I knew Hanley would love it just as I did! For nostalgic reasons, I'll be pleased even if she uses it for a short time.
My friend Vanessa helped me sand away at the bed and then she also helped me paint it. I had to spend hours gluing some of the wood pieces back together and clamping the wood to make it stick. I'll admit that I didn't exactly have the proper clamps soooo I may have been using jumper cables for a car to serve as clamps! Haha it worked fine, other than the prongs digging into the paint so I had to lightly sand and repaint some areas. It beat spending money on the clamps! Coincidently, I happened to find one rusty clamp in the yard while fetching the trash and recycle bins one day.
I ordered a twin mattress from IKEA and unrolled it when it arrived in the mail.
When we finally put the bed in Hanley's room, I had several wood slats and some CSB wood to hold the mattress up, as I didn't want a box spring just yet.
I've kept Hanleys old crib mattress on the floor just in case she rolls out of bed. The crib mattress slid perfectly under her bed while she was not 'using' it.
While Hanley was in her crib, for the last several weeks before getting her big girl bed, we took the front off of her crib to get her used to the change. She rolled out for almost a week straight in the middle of the night, without ever even waking up. I would go in, scoop her up, and tuck her back in and she would never wake. Finally, I attached a railing to the side of her crib so she couldn't roll out any longer. When we set up her big girl bed, I never attached the railing and she's never rolled out yet, I'm assuming because she has much more room in a twin bed.
She loves her big girl bed so much, now we are just waiting for her birthday party for her to get a new comforter set.