Retirees inspired to build beds for children
Nonprofit Sleep in Heavenly Peace provides them to families in need
PITTSBURGH — Ed and Elaine Snyder were looking for a new project.
The retired couple, who live in Mars, Butler County, Pennsylvania, were looking for other activities after tackling two house flips. It was then that their daughter-in-law mentioned a charity with which she had been volunteering.
Now the Snyders don’t decorate and remodel houses — they build beds. They got involved with Sleep in Heavenly Peace, a nonprofit with around 250 chapters throughout the country that build wooden twin beds from scratch to give to children who don’t have them.
The charity, founded in Twin Falls, Idaho, did not have a chapter in western Pennsylvania, according to the Snyders. So they started one of their own, along with friend David Nock, in February.
The couple went to training at the Idaho headquarters of Sleep in Heavenly Peace in October 2020 and subsequently rented warehouse space in Beaver County. They also purchased four tables for sanding pine picked out for the beds, woodworking jigs, drill machines and other equipment. Each headboard is hand branded with a hot iron: “SHP.”
They explained the old-fashioned but effective technique of using troughs filled with a solution of vinegar and steel wool to stain the wood, which involves weeks of stirring before soaking the individual pieces for just 20 seconds. The Snyders also purchase twin mattresses for the beds as well as
sheets, pillows, blankets and comforters. In a typical “build day,” they and volunteers will construct 10 to 15 beds. They’ve given away more than 30 since March.
“Everything’s new,” Elaine Snyder said. “If their parents can’t afford a bed, that’s an incident that happened to them. That’s not their fault. They deserve to have a bed the same as everyone else. We really deck them out.”
The chapter of Sleep in Heavenly Peace will deliver within a 40-minute drive of either the Snyders’ home in Mars or the warehouse to Butler, Beaver and Allegheny counties and assemble the beds, which are sometimes bunked.
Snyder said 2% to 3% of U.S. children do not have a bed to sleep in, and children and youth services departments will not place a child in a home, even with a relative, without a
bed for them. Nearly all of the deliveries so far, she noted, have been to families headed by single parents, and the beds are for ages 3 to 17.
She recalled a delivery to a family near Pittsburgh’s North Side in late March. The mother said, “I know I can’t ask. I don’t have a bed, either.” So Snyder found another bed on Facebook Marketplace, and the seller, hearing whom it was for,
gave it to the Snyders for free. The free bed, however, turned out to be a kid’s bed as well, so the little girl received the other bed and the mother was given the SHP bed.
“It all came out in the wash,” Snyder said. “But the mom, when we went to bring the bed in for her, she said, ‘My room’s downstairs.’ And her room was in the basement by the furnace. They had to shim
the one leg because it was on cement floors, so the bed was teetering. She was thrilled to have a bed.”
Another delivery involved grandparents who had taken in three grandchildren who had “nothing in their rooms at all.” The children were excited to receive their own beds.
In addition to helping with production and delivery, Snyder also seeks out families who need beds for their children. Teachers have applied on behalf of students and walk parents through the process. She has also been in touch with crisis centers, women and children’s groups, and homeless shelters.
All the chapters of Sleep in Heavenly Peace came together last month for the third annual Bunks Across America event, where each built beds on the same day in a show of solidarity, upholding the group’s
slogan, “No kid sleeps on the floor in our town.”
The charity started in 2012 when Idaho resident Luke Mickelson made a bed for a neighbor boy for Christmas. Out of the leftover wood, Mickelson built a second bed and put it on Facebook.
Soon he had multiple requests from folks in need of a bed and others eager to help him build more. As the organization grew but bypassed western Pennsylvania, the opportunity presented itself to the Snyders.
“My husband and I, I guess we’re gutsier that we thought we were,” Snyder said. “When I think of the shop and how much we had to buy and set up and figure, ‘This gets done first,’ and how everything works in the production line, it just floors me that we managed to do all that. But we did.”