How to Build an Epic Pillow Fort (Summer Bucket List Series)

There is a morning every June when I walk downstairs, and my basement has been transformed into a magical world.

Where the couches used to be, there is a tunnel. Where the bookshelf full of board games used to be, there is a doorway with a snowman blanket hung up for a curtain (yes, a snowman blanket, in June, because when you are building something this big, every blanket in the house gets drafted). Every sheet I own is strung wall to wall, and some of them are tacked right up to the ceiling. There are little rooms with little doorways, and somewhere in the middle of all of it, a hammer and a half-empty box of nails sitting on the table like evidence.

That is the morning I know summer has officially begun.

Not the last day of school, and not the calendar flipping to June. The fort. And more specifically, Bella's fort.

This is how summer starts at our house, and it has started this exact way for more than ten years.

Bella was eight or nine the first time she turned the basement into a pillow fort. She is nineteen now, home from Clemson for the summer. She started college studying engineering before she switched to business, but based on how elaborate this fort is, she clearly would have made an amazing engineer. This is not a sheet-over-two-chairs situation. This year she built a multi-room, nearly double-decker structure with a separate room for each of her sisters, draped over the couches, anchored to the bookshelves, and strung all the way up to the ceiling.

How To Build an Epic Pillow Fort

A few things I have learned from a decade of these:

Go big, and go up. Bigger is always better with a fort like this, and the real secret is to build it vertically. You want the eye to travel all the way from the floor to the ceiling, so we actually attach sheets to the ceiling and let them drape down like walls. A fort that climbs all the way up to the ceiling is what gives it that wow factor.

Use everything you have. You will want every sheet, every blanket, every couch cushion, every quilt, and every inflatable mattress in the house. The fort is only as epic as your willingness to strip every bed you own, and flat sheets in particular make wonderful walls because they drape so long and so wide. (Click HERE for my favorite pillow fort essentials)

Use nails or Command hooks to attach things. Nails work beautifully to attach sheets to the walls and the ceiling, and for us, a few nail holes are a small price to pay for a summer well lived. However, if you would rather not put holes in your walls, Command hooks work just as well, and they come down clean at the end of the week. You can also tuck the edges of sheets down into the couch cushions to hold them in place, or lay a few heavy books on top of the sheets to anchor them.

Build a double-decker bed. This is Bella's signature move. She sets an inflatable mattress on top of a card table, pushes it right up against the couch or the bed, and piles blankets on top, so that it becomes a raised, almost double-decker bunk. We bring every single air mattress in the house down for this, because the whole goal is for everyone to actually be able to sleep down there for several nights.

Give every child her own themed room. This is what takes the whole thing from a pillow fort to an entire little world. Each of my girls gets her own bedroom, complete with her own lovey, her stuffed animals, her pillows, and her favorite books. Then we build the shared rooms: a little kitchen area set up by the bar and stocked with snacks, a movie-watching room, and an art room. Having different themed rooms for different things is the whole magic of it.

And here is the funny part. Even though everyone gets her own room, what they love most is all sleeping together anyway. They build these elaborate separate spaces, and then they pile into one of them for a few nights, slumber-party style, until we finally make them take the whole thing down. The board-game bookcase becomes a wall, the unicorn keeps watch from a corner, and for the better part of a week, the entire downstairs belongs to the kids.

Here is the part that makes my heart clench a little.

The girl who used to be the eight-year-old sleeping in the fort is now the nineteen-year-old who comes home from college and builds it for the eight-year-old who sleeps in it now. Somewhere along the way, she went from the one being given the magic to the one making it. She does not have to do this. She is grown, and she could be doing a hundred other things with a summer night. Instead, she spends an entire day stringing up every sheet we own so that her little sisters can wake up inside something they will remember for the rest of their lives.

In the room where she builds it, there is a sign on the wall that I have had for years. It says that home is where love and laughter live, and blessings abound. I do not think I have ever looked at it and meant it more than I do standing in the middle of one of Bella's forts.

One day there will be a summer when Bella is too far away to come home and build it. But not this one. This summer, the basement became a maze of sheets and fairy lights and snack wrappers, and for a few perfect nights, it was the most magical place in the whole world.

So strip the beds, and let them build the thing.

Your epic summer starts now.

By: Amanda Fleming Taylor

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