As a kid, the racecar bed was king. It held the promise of a night’s sleep replete with fantastical images of racing on a track or on Mario Kart’s Rainbow Road. I, unfortunately, never got to own one. Maybe my children will. That said, after talking with Ali about his son’s four-post Lift/bunkbed which comes complete with a Corvette Z06, I may have to up my game.
Like myself, Ali wanted a racecar bed but with three older brothers and a cash-strapped family, that wasn’t ever going to happen. Life went on and Ali was getting ready for his second child. A slip-up on the sex found Ali learning he was about to have a boy and like any proud father, he went bananas online and bought his forthcoming child the Chevrolet Corvette bed of his own dreams. Everything in the room was licensed by Chevrolet and for the first few years, couldn’t have worked better.
But Ali’s son started growing up and one day while walking through Ikea, the bane of any parent’s life, his son saw a four-post bunkbed. He was enamored with the idea of climbing into his own bed, just like any precocious now five-year-old. Ali told The Drive, “[My son] instantly named them ladder beds and wanted one. The dilemma was he didn’t want to part with the car and it made no sense putting two beds in his room. So I passed it off.”
That is until he got home and did what any good father would do, he started thinking about how he could turn his son’s want into reality but to a level, only a gearhead father would. “Later that night,” says Ali, “I came up with the idea of ‘Well, what if I took the bed and built a frame to resemble a four-post lift and put the bed on top?’ My son loved the idea and my wife was supportive as she usually is after giving me the look of, ‘Where do you come up with this stuff?!’”
A few weeks later, Ali and the kids went on a Home Depot “To just get an idea of what I would need, acquire pricing, etc. With no set plan or blueprints, I walked up and down a few aisles and started designing it out in my head, Ali says, adding, “We were so unprepared, we didn’t even have a cart but luckily we brought the truck.” He then called his wife to get a few quick bedroom and bed dimensions, bought the necessary building materials and headed home to essentially build the entire thing from his own head.
The finished bed came out brilliantly and Ali’s son absolutely loved it. The only issue was that when they had originally bought all the materials, they forgot to purchase enough to build Ali’s son a ladder. He resorted for a short time to picking him up and down until he and his oldest daughter, a far better hand at basic math according to Ali, to build proper steps. Later, and after realizing the bed could be bettered aesthetically with diamond plates across the ladder’s rungs but that would be sharp, Ali found some vinyl versions that worked perfectly.
A can of paint, some decals from Ali’s enthusiast friends at Prime NY, AMS Performance, King Racing Bearings, and AMFautomotofoto finished off the look. However, after the reception online, which included a number of those company’s expressing their support of the project and sending Ali’s son some enthusiast goodies, Ali wants to continue to build the bed out even further, including adding strips of LED lighting ala the 1990s-tastic Underglo, as well as some felt and a mural of the night’s sky.
As for Ali’s son’s reaction, well, “My son was absolutely jumping around like a monkey. He ran screaming “Appi!”—which means sister in Urdu—getting her to come and when she started to come up the stairs he started screaming ‘mommy come look.’ That was instantly followed by a priceless hug and a scream ‘omg I have the coolest mom and dad’ and ‘this is so cool’ My wife’s reaction was more of a ‘nice job. I guess I’m not changing the sheets anymore!’
What’s cooler is that Ali and his wife have now been discussing whether they could help other enthusiast children live out their gearhead dreams just like their son. Ali told The Drive, “My wife and I were talking about the fact that so many people want one. We may start building and using the proceeds for certain charities.” Fingers crossed they’ll make an exception to build a few choice Queen- and King-sized ones for the, uh, bigger kids.