(In which a bed is made)²

Once the master bedroom floor was complete, the next big project was to have a place to sleep. Our current mattress wasn't doing my back any favors so we went out and bought 2 new twin XL mattresses from Parklane*. We wanted a king, but the way the stairwell was built, anyone over 5'9" will hit their head on the way up or down, and there was no way a king sized mattress or foundation would fit; even a queen is probably out of the question. Luckily, two twin XLs side by side come to 78x80 (WxL) vs a king's 76x80. This created our next problem: having never owned a king sized bed before, I had no foundation or frame to put our brand new and moderately expensive mattresses on. So, deciding I didn't have enough to do, I set out to build us a bedframe out of dimensional lumber, loosely following the plans of Matthias Wandel. Well, I ended up buying some of the cedar lumber I would need, but then remembered the 40 bdft of 4/4 european beech I had laying around.

Design

The plans went through several revisions, mostly for height and proportion relative to the mattress and users (us). The wife declared she didn't want to have to jump into bed, so that set the final mattress height to within a few inches, and the mattress thickness set the rest. I wanted a headboard tall enough to sit up against, and settled on a foot board that would allow us to use the end of the bed as a bench. I decided on a built up post to make through mortises without any of the work, and use the entire side rails as through tennons. I left the final rail/post connection undecided until assembly so I could see what options would work/look the best. Overall, it is loosely based on the bed I grew up in, although that was a separable bunk bed.

Construction

The beech lumber I have is S2S with no straight edges, so my first job was to straight line rip all of my stock to determine what usable widths I had. I made a straight line jig for my table saw: I've been meaning to make one for over a year, but, work didn't leave me with much free time.

After ripping a straight edge, I ripped the boards I would use to width and ran them through the thickness planer.

Because I didn't have many boards above 5", I ended up having to  build up the bed posts in two different thicknesses so they would be square. The inner pieces were left at ~7/8" to match the rails, but the outer pieces of the post had to be taken to 3/4". Surprisingly, most of my boards were only a 16th shy of a full 1", so I had quite a lot of planing to do to get down to 3/4". keeping track of which boards needed to be planed to what thickness was also a challenge and I screwed up twice by over planing.

After planing came crosscutting. The post pieces were easy enough, but the wider boards that made up the rails and headboard were a bit dangerous to do on the table saw. I switched over to my track saw, but the last board I ripped made the saw jump the track and I had a close call. Luckily, it only damaged the rail, but it was disconcerting enough for me to halt work for the rest of that day.

Then I glued up the posts and cleaned them up on the tablesaw and planer. The turned out quite nice, but I ended up cutting the "mortise" for the headboards a little wide on one of the posts, so that had to be shimmed with some of the thinner offcuts. The through mortise on the posts came from the glueup, but the mortise for the width-rails had to be cut the old fashioned way (you know, with a router) and then cleaned up with a chisel.

Here is how the footboard goes together:

I saved the one board in my pile with a little bit of figuring for the footboard, since that'll nominally be visible once the bed is assembled.

I brought the pieces upstairs for sanding down to 220 grit then glued up the foot and head board: I waited until the pieces were upstairs because assembled, the headboard is probably close to 70 lbs, not to mention the sheer size.

I also went to lowes and bought 11 2x4s for slats. They were pretty rough, so I ran them through the planer enough to nearly remove the mill roundover.

Test Assembly

After glueup, I cleaned up the pieces, re-sanded to 220 grit where required, and did a test fit. I had reached the point where I needed to decided how to secure the side rails to the posts. I settled on wedge-dowel pins, though if I had the equipment and materials, I would've used square brass pegs in a round draw-bore. I can always switch to brass pegs if the current pins fail.

The slat cleat also needed spacers installed to keep the 2x4s from sliding around. I used a cutoff from ripping the posts to make the spacers and glued them in next to the 2x4s with cardboard shims to provide some wiggle room.

Once the glue dried, it was time for a finish. My primary concern was moisture absorbance. There are conflicting reports, but beech is considered to be a relatively unstable wood when it comes to growth and shrinkage: a surface finish could help minimize the amount of moisture absorbance. Since I have a lot more shellac than I need, I made a gallon of 2 lb/cut shellac (the same flakes I used on the floors) and applied 3 coats on the rails and 5 on the headboard.

Final resting place

Once the shellac was dry, I moved the bed, one piece at a time, into the master bedroom. It was a tight fit, I designed the bed around a king mattress, but I didn't realize two twins was 2 inches wider. Luckily (I am using that word a lot) I was able to adjust the mortise depths and rail lengths to buy the 2 inches I needed.

We picked our penguin sheets for the inaugural bed making. (Sorry for the dark picture, I don't have access to my photo editor at the new house).

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*I am in no way associated or paid by Parklane mattresses, nor have I received any discounted or free goods in exchange for mentioning or using their products.