Custom Designed Captain's Beds

This is one of my first major wood projects. We ran out of space in our three bedroom house for our growing family and realized we had a need to save space by acquiring two captain’s beds for our girls’ bedroom. The bedroom was small and could not handle two beds and two dressers. Unfortunately most captain’s beds on the market had small dresser drawers that were meant to be supplemental to a real dresser. We decided to try our hand at designing and building our own beds that could be passed down through the family.

We designed the beds to be “all in one”. Each bed has four 24” by 18” draws – roughly the size of standard dresser drawers. There is a deep cubby between the drawers that holds a toy box. A second cubby (not pictured) exists at the foot of the bed and is used to hold a laundry basket. We decided to do shelves for the headboard so that each girl had somewhere to put her personal items that were not to be shared.

Both beds are primarly made out of 12” Poplar planks, ripped down into 2” strips for the bed’s core framing and then used as 12” planks for the outter “skin” of the bed. We used plywood for the cubby walls. If I could make these beds again I would probably stick with the planks in the cubbies as well so that the finish looks consistent between the main bed and the cubbies.

The two captain’s beds have served us well. About a year after this pic was taken we needed to move our third girl into the same room. To accomodate, we modified one of the captain’s beds into a bunk bed. We never quite finished that project (literally, we did not do the finishing work) so I will probably not post that picture. Regardless, this is the project that got us hooked on building our own furniture – we are bit by the wood bug!