That’s right, we are finally building our bed, hooray!!! I tell you this with much excitement because this has been the state of our bed for nearly a year
That is actually much nicer than it’s been. We’ve got walls painted and a rug that doesn’t have mold on it. Thank goodness our room doesn’t still look like this
Because that would suck, right?
It’s long been on our to do list to finally get our bed build (and we were even thinking about building it last summer/fall), so it’s wonderful to finally be at the point that we’re not only thinking about it, but actually building it.
Over the last several months Chris and I have had many conversations about the size, style, finish, etc. We’ve casually talked about the plans for it while watching TV, while out to dinner and while falling asleep wishing we didn’t have to crawl out of bed from a mattress sitting on the floor 🙂 So needless to say when we finally got started we were well on our way to having made most of the stylistic and functional decisions.
So here are the details:
1. It’ll be a platform storage bed. This was the very first decision we made. Our bedroom is not very large and we’d like to eliminate at least one of our dressers so the room doesn’t feel so crowded. Future bedrooms may not be as small as ours is currently, but we still like the idea of a bedroom being less cluttered and making our bed more useful than just sleeping in it 🙂
2. What kind of storage will there be? Well, that was a debate we had. We initially wanted the bed to have storage drawers, but at one point we also debated it just having cubbies to make building it easier. Sort of like this one
(found here)
We didn’t like the aesthetics of the cubbies though, so while it would be easier to build, we realized that we liked the idea of drawers better.
3. How many drawers will there be? We thought about having 2 rows of drawers on Chris’ side, and 2 rows of drawers on my side. But as we were drawing out the plans for it we realized that would make the bed pretty tall. Including face frames, drawers deep enough for our preference and plus our tallish mattress sitting on top of all of that we were looking at a finished bed height of about 24-28″. That doesn’t seem that tall, but when you actually put a tape measure up and try to pretend getting into a bed that that’s tall (especially for someone who is 5’4″) it felt ridiculously tall. Instead we opted for just one row of drawers, but those drawers could now be taller than we initially had planned for.
4. How will it be built? A storage bed is kind of huge and we really want to be able to move it easily so the we knew the bed needed to be build in pieces so we could move it around and install it without needing 7 people to move it and possibly knocking down a wall. And thanks to the wonderful Ana White we were given a rough idea of how to plan out a platform bed split into 3 parts so that it can actually be moved
(fabulous Ana White plan found here)
5. What will the finish be? We had always had the idea that the bed would be painted. We’d never really second guessed that idea. That is until we were just about to build it. One night I asked Chris, “The bed would probably hold up better if it was stained, huh?” To which we sort of let out a groan. Painting it = easier and cheaper to build. But, it also means it;ll get scuffed a lot easier. Of course we could get some really fancy factory painting system, but those cost thousands of dollars. If we stained it that would be that whacking your shoe against it wouldn’t result in a big black mark on the side of the bed. Of course that means that the bed will be more difficult and expensive to build to make it stain grade. But it will look a lot better over time and require less maintenance.
6. What will the bed be built out of? There will be several different materials that will build the bed, but like the hutch we built, the inside will be painted cabinet grade plywood, and all the exposed parts will be stained cherry. We like building with cherry because it’s strong, looks nice and is less expensive than other stain grade woods. We’ve been super pleased with the hutch, so we figured why not go with cherry again? We haven’t figured out what color stain we’ll be using, but that’ll come soon (we’ve already got some samples that I’ll be testing out in the next couple of days).
Once all those decisions were made we were finally at a point where we could build. So that’s just what’s happening
That’s the rough skeleton of 2 of the 3 pieces of our future wonderful storage platform bed! The idea that I will no longer have to crawl out of bed from a mattress on the ground is very exciting. Especially because that’s just what we’ve been doing for the past 10+ months. Our guess is that this project will take about 6 weeks to complete, so hopefully by the end of September or beginning of October we’ve got a fancy, pretty, amazingly efficient bed frame to move into our bedroom without breaking our backs or needing to rip down any walls. Hooray!