As the summer draws to a close, I have been scrambling to finish house projects before it’s time to go back to school. The end of this season always makes me a little sad, a little nostalgic. That’s why finishing big projects and feeling accomplished is so much better because it distracts me of the philosophical thoughts about life’s shortness, how there’s never enough time, and so on.

One of our big projects was to decorate our guest bedroom. I wrote this post about making the curtains for the room, but we also needed a bed. We already had a mattress from our deceased futon (it served us well, but had a fatal accident during transport to our house which frankly was too much trouble to repair; the accident was convenient too as the futon had been slowly falling apart). All we needed was a bed frame. As usual, it’s so much more fun to make your own!

This became a joint project with my husband, which was great because he had been wanting to do more carpentry and I always like bonding over power tools and slight danger in the garage! I asked him to choose what bed he wanted to make (it can be scary to say “honey, do whatever you like!” but trust me, it sometimes always works out). He chose a simple and low waste platform bed design that has a rustic look but gets the job done. We didn’t mind that it had a less-finished look because it complimented the simple look of the bedroom well and then it looks homemade, which earns you more compliments.

Since I’m writing the post and you all know by now how awesome I am at measuring and detailed instruction-following completely messing up specific directions that involve engineering, I will just send you to the tutorial link from Instructables.com. We did make some changes:

• added a bar down the middle for extra support
• 12 slats instead of 10 for more stability
• shrunk the size of the frame by 5″ on each side to match a full size mattress (tutorial is for a queen)

Needless to say, my husband did all the planning and most of the measuring, but I got my fair share of power tool action!

The first surprise in this project was how little wood we actually needed to buy. We bought three 2″x4″x10′, six 1″x4″x12′ and exactly 100 #10 2″ screws and 12 #10 3″ screws. That was it! I was amazed at how little that was in terms of materials. We had all the necessary power tools back home, including a drill, an electric sander, a circular saw and clamps. We spent $70 in materials (instructions says $30 but perhaps they had a cheaper supplier or live in a different dimension where dollars are worth more).

The second surprise (which was no surprise to me but may be to anyone new to DYI projects) was that the tutorial says an hour for this project. Ha HA with capitals. It took us about four hours total, although some of that time was waiting for the drill’s battery to charge and a little bit of it was redoing work because of stupid things, like drilling the frame together with one of the sides going through a stool we were using as a horse (“er… the stool appears to be attached to the bed”).

No step-by-steps photos this time, but that’s so you can’t see all the messy closeups.

Regardless of the attached stool, the project was relatively simple and very fun to do together. We felt so accomplished when we had a sturdy, good bed! Carpentry seems scary because of the measuring (no one else has nightmares of rulers and levels?) but it truly isn’t so bad, especially when you aren’t as concerned with the perfect look and finish but instead happy with sturdy and homemade (also applies to cakes). Next we would like to try making some benches for our yard and maybe someday a gazebo!

Welcome to our guest bedroom!

The bed meets with the very rigorous George Certificate of Approval for Napping Locations