# Built-In Bed



## DrPain (Sep 2, 2009)

*Pleasing the Customer*

I always enjoy reading project blogs here on LJ, so I've decided to attempt one myself. Hopefully some folks will find it enjoyable!

I've built a few beds over the past years, the most recent being this one that my son uses:










It's solid maple and has been beat up a little over the years and acquired glow-in-the-dark stars, all of which adds to its character, and I don't mind in the least. I like that the bed has been host to both my children and that they've felt free to customize it. The finials on the bedposts remove, and there are special finials for Halloween and Christmas and so on.

Truth be told I probably owe my wife a bed next, but I've skipped over her to do one for my daughter, mostly because she's in high school now and I can foresee the day when she won't be around the house anymore. She's always been the sort of person who likes to curl up in a nook with a book, to be enclosed and cozy. So it seemed natural to make a built-in bed for her.

There are a number of remarkable built-in beds out on the Web. I particularly enjoyed perusing the galleries at these links:

http://willowdecor.blogspot.com/2008/11/built-in-beds_16.html
http://pinkwallpaper.blogspot.com/2009/08/love-my-parents.html

Although my daughter and I both found a number of built-ins that we liked, we ended up settling on one my wife found in a magazine:










To my eye, this is a simple but wonderful design. The lines are clean and the proportions well-balanced. It also has some interesting design elements-particularly the 2 inch thick sides and shelves. To my eye, it's a little "over-tall" but as it happens our ceilings are lower (8') so that proportion will naturally be more balanced. However, I can't simply build something that I like-I have to please my customers, after all. So after some consultations with my client, we ended up with a somewhat modified design that added real drawers to the bookshelves and a valance with curtains. Here's the Sketchup drawing we ended with:










I elaborated that Sketchup model a little bit (although I never took it to a fully detailed plan) and then blew it up into component parts to get a handle on the scope of the project and to make it easier to feed it into the Cut-List plugin. It took me a bit of work to fully understand the Cut-List plugin, but I exchanged a few emails with Steve, who was very helpful and patient. Excellent customer service!










Probably the most interesting problem at this stage is how to make the 2 inch thick sides. Anything solid that thick at that size is going to be immensely heavy, but at the same time the sides need to be substantial enough to anchor the built-in and allow the mounting of lamps and shelves. I contemplated a number of different approaches, and settled on making a sandwich of two layers of 1/2 plywood with a layer of 1/2 spacers in-between. That yields 1 1/2" and should be (somewhat) less heavy. We'll see. I'm curious whether anyone else has faced a similar problem and what solution they settled on… Please leave a comment!

The wood is all acquired from the local Big Box Lumber Store, although I had to special order the birch-sided 1/2" plywood. (I was able to order C3 grade and save a *little* money, since the whole thing will be painted.) That all came in today and has been transferred to the workshop-in this case, our garage:










My normal "workshop" is about a 10'x10' space in the basement and would not accommodate a project this size. For the same reason I lack a table saw and some other useful tools. You may be able to make out a circular saw cutting jig on the top of the wood pile. It's resting on a hard foam panel. Together that's my setup for cutting the plywood-the foam panel goes underneath the plywood to be cut, supporting it and providing some tearout protection. The foam panel idea is something I picked up off the Interwebs, and it's a really great tip-much, much better than trying to cut on horses or 2×4s. I also invested in a new 40 tooth blade for the circular saw, so I'm hoping my edges won't be too ragged. (I picked up an 80 tooth blade for the miter saw as well.)

The plan for the rest of the weekend is to assemble one of the large panels.


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## Robb (Aug 18, 2007)

DrPain said:


> *Pleasing the Customer*
> 
> I always enjoy reading project blogs here on LJ, so I've decided to attempt one myself. Hopefully some folks will find it enjoyable!
> 
> ...


Good start! I've heard about using foamcore to back a cut like that, but have never tried it myself. I'm looking forward to seeing your progress.


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## NBeener (Sep 16, 2009)

DrPain said:


> *Pleasing the Customer*
> 
> I always enjoy reading project blogs here on LJ, so I've decided to attempt one myself. Hopefully some folks will find it enjoyable!
> 
> ...


Wow.

Sleeping quarters fit for royalty


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## a1Jim (Aug 9, 2008)

DrPain said:


> *Pleasing the Customer*
> 
> I always enjoy reading project blogs here on LJ, so I've decided to attempt one myself. Hopefully some folks will find it enjoyable!
> 
> ...


Great job


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## brunob (Dec 26, 2006)

DrPain said:


> *Pleasing the Customer*
> 
> I always enjoy reading project blogs here on LJ, so I've decided to attempt one myself. Hopefully some folks will find it enjoyable!
> 
> ...


Great start. Thanks for the tip on the foam panel. Never seen that.


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## sras (Oct 31, 2009)

DrPain said:


> *Pleasing the Customer*
> 
> I always enjoy reading project blogs here on LJ, so I've decided to attempt one myself. Hopefully some folks will find it enjoyable!
> 
> ...


Your modified design is a significant improvement! I am looking forward to following your story. I have used masking tape to limit rough edges on plywood - works pretty well.


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## DrPain (Sep 2, 2009)

DrPain said:


> *Pleasing the Customer*
> 
> I always enjoy reading project blogs here on LJ, so I've decided to attempt one myself. Hopefully some folks will find it enjoyable!
> 
> ...


So far I haven't had any problems with tearout on the plywood panels. The first couple of cuts I did do blue tape front and back but it didn't seem necessary so I've stopped. I am using a brand-new 40 tooth blade in my circular saw, so that probably helps. I considered getting a 120 tooth plywood blade, but it seemed like overkill, and I was concerned how effective it would be on 1/2" plywood.


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## DrPain (Sep 2, 2009)

*SUDO: Make Me a Sandwich*

(The Story So Far: Our Hero is constructing a built-in bed for his daughter, with inadequate tools and woodworking experience.)

As mentioned in my previous post, one of the challenges of this project is to construct the large, 1 1/2" thick panels that make up the bed sides. These panels are 96" tall and 58" wide, so they cannot be cut from a single sheet of plywood. (The built-in is sized to fit a full size mattress.) They are intended to be 1 1/2" thick, so I have decided to make them with two 1/2" plywood sides and some 1/2" plywood spacers, as illustrated here:










I have to admit that when I picked up the hard foam insulation sheet (which I'm using as a sacrificial support when cutting the plywood) I was tempted to make the sandwich with a foam sheet on the inside. But there are a couple of problems with that approach. First, making the "extension" to reach the required 58" width would have been difficult; obviously the foam couldn't be counted on for structural support. Second, I don't really have the equipment to do the full sheet glue up that would be required. I could certainly rig some weights up and press the sandwich together, but I dubious that I could keep things centered and eliminate voids.

My plan to make the plywood sandwiches was to use screws. For one skin I can screw the skin to the spacers from the spacer side. For the other skin I have to put screws into the skin, but this will eventually be painted so that's not too terrible-spackle over the screws and paint it up. In the event, this worked fairly well, although I used a lot more screws than I thought I would have to use. Even on the first skin, I ended up having to screw down the "extension" to avoid a noticeable seam.

Here's what that ended up looking like. You can see the row of screws along the extension edge:










I forget to snap any pictures while the spacer skeleton was visible; I'll do that on the next panel.

Another tricky bit for this panel was the knee curve. It's a 12" radius curve, so I made a template out of some extra 1/4" plywood I had laying around. (I drew the curve freehand with a 12" string attached to a pencil and then cut it out as carefully as I could with a jigsaw.) I cut the straight edges of the panel skins with the circular saw down to where the curve started, and then finished the curve with a jigsaw. I also ended up cutting a curved 12×12 inch spacer piece. When everything was put together, the straight edge along the top front of the panel and the horizontal top edge lined up very well. The bottom front edge didn't line up quite so well, so I took an 1/8" off the front with the circular saw and fence after it was glued up to even up that edge. The curve is also a bit of a mess, and I'll probably have to go over it with a router and a trim bit to get it consistent. (I'm afraid if I take a rasp to it I'll tear out the edges.)

The last step was to glue on a 3/4" facing to the bottom front edge. I got started on that and discovered that my pipe clamps didn't quite reach the full width of the panel. That led to this kludged up arrangement:










I haven't taken it apart yet, but it looked like it made for a solid glue-up, even though I wasn't able to use a lot of clamping pressure. In retrospect I thought I should have clamped the 2×4 to the far edge in addition to clamping it down.


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## botanist (Sep 17, 2008)

DrPain said:


> *SUDO: Make Me a Sandwich*
> 
> (The Story So Far: Our Hero is constructing a built-in bed for his daughter, with inadequate tools and woodworking experience.)
> 
> ...


Love the title of the post and it looks like a great project. Good luck with it!


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## DrPain (Sep 2, 2009)

DrPain said:


> *SUDO: Make Me a Sandwich*
> 
> (The Story So Far: Our Hero is constructing a built-in bed for his daughter, with inadequate tools and woodworking experience.)
> 
> ...


Yes, that title might go over the heads of the non-geeks 

http://www.techyouruniverse.com/funny/sudo-make-me-a-sandwhich


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## DrPain (Sep 2, 2009)

*All These Sandwiches Are Making Me Hungry*

With one large panel built-up (if not finished), I moved on to the other panel of the same end. This is essentially just a 24"x96" bookshelf side, although like the large panel it is made up of a sandwich of two 1/2" sheets of birch-sided plywood with 1/2" plywood spacers in between. This shows what the sandwich looked like just before gluing on the second face:










I fastened the second face of the large panel on with screws through the face. For this one I decided to see if I could simply glue it on and weight it down. I slathered on the glue, mated the faces, and then taped all the corners with masking tape hoping to keep them from sliding out of alignment when I piled on the weight. Then I put the rest of the plywood as well as the large panel on top and left it to dry overnight.

While the glue was drying I zipped down to the workshop and put in some time on the "other" ongoing project:










Meanwhile, the large panel needed to have the numerous screw holes spackled so that it could be sanded and painted. Here I enlisted the customer for some "sweat equity" and put her to work spackling up the numerous holes. We're using the keen new spackle that goes on pink and dries white. Science is wonderful.










When the glue-up had dried on the other panel I unweighted it and took a look to see how it had worked out. The good news was that the panel hadn't slipped and was lined up very nicely. The bad news was that the glue-up wasn't very even-in a number of spots there was about a 1/16" gap:










I'm not too worried about gapping this small, because the only edge is going to be faced with 1×2, which is slightly oversized for the edge and will cover any gap. So I ran the circular saw down the glued-up edge to get a nice even surface and glued on the face:










Interestingly, I took the tape measure to both panels and it appears that the smaller panel is slightly undersized to the large panel (about 23 3/4" wide instead of the intended 24" wide). Cutting the larger panel down to match the smaller panel will give me a nice edge for veneering I'm going to do on that piece, and make things match up exactly, but it will require me to rework the knee curve. I'm going to have to do some work on the knee curve anyway, so I think I'll do this. But that's a job for tomorrow.


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## sras (Oct 31, 2009)

DrPain said:


> *All These Sandwiches Are Making Me Hungry*
> 
> With one large panel built-up (if not finished), I moved on to the other panel of the same end. This is essentially just a 24"x96" bookshelf side, although like the large panel it is made up of a sandwich of two 1/2" sheets of birch-sided plywood with 1/2" plywood spacers in between. This shows what the sandwich looked like just before gluing on the second face:
> 
> ...


Progressing along nicely - nice to see the "customer" getting involved!


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## DrPain (Sep 2, 2009)

*Scraping By*

(The Story So Far: Our Hero is constructing a built-in bed for his daughter, with inadequate tools and woodworking experience.)

I've spent the last couple of days finishing up the panels that make up the sides of the bed enclosure and bookshelves.

Part of the effort is to finish the edges so that I can put on face boards or prepare the surface for veneering. The panels are a sandwich of 3 sheets of plywood, so naturally they do not line up perfectly at the edges. The straight edges I could finish up pretty easily with either the saw or hand planes, but the knee curve in the large panels was more difficult. My initial plan was to use the router and some sort of template bit (and I even went so far as to buy a 1.5" bottom bearing trim bit), but that plan ran into a couple of problems. I rarely use my router handheld, and I've never done work with a template before, and it turns out that my Bosch router has some sort of oddball template system. I could have mounted my template on the bottom side of the piece and used the trim bit without a template bearing, but as I was thinking on that I ended up flattening the curve manually with this tool:










I don't know what Kobalt calls this exactly, or even why I originally bought it, but I find it a very useful tool for rough shaping of wood in situations where planes and files are hard to bring to bear. It made pretty short work of scraping out the various bumps in the curve, and then I finished it off with some 80 grit in my random orbit sander.

I also needed to put a rabbet in the back of each panel to accept the back panel of the bookshelves. Again, my original thought was to use the router, but I realized that I could do the rabbet easily with the circular saw. That's partly because of how I built the back of each panel. On the backs of the panels, I recessed the middle sheet of plywood by a half-inch, resulting in a half-inch channel down the back edge of each panel:










The purpose of this channel is to run electrical wiring for the sconce lamps that will eventually be mounted inside the bed enclosure. But the channel also made it easy to cut the rabbet-I just had to take the circular saw and slice a 1/4" off of one of the side sheets of plywood. (In fact, the left side sheet in the picture above has been rabbeted.)

This is where I made my only major mistake in the project (so far): I rabbeted the wrong side of one of the large panels. Grrr… I was afraid of doing that, thought about it several times, marked the orientation of both of the large panels, and still cut the wrong side. At least the error will be at the back of the piece!

I also made a minor mistake in trimming the bottom of one panel. After finishing, I realized that the trim cut was not square. That was really baffling, particularly after I checked my saw and found it square. Eventually I realized that to cut through the full 1.5" of the panel, I had lowered the circular saw to the point where the motor housing rode on top of the rail on my cutting jig, tilting the saw as it was cutting. A useful tip if you're going to be cutting plywood with a circular saw and a jig!

I also measured my daughter's room again and realized that the full 96" panels were not going to fit into her room, where the 96" nominal ceiling is actually about 95" thanks to wooden flooring and so on. So I went back to all four panels and cut them down to 94.5". This was a little trickier than it might sound because I was afraid of hitting a buried screw in the middle of the sandwich, so I had to carefully cut through the top ply, chisel that off and check for screws before completing the cut.

At the end of the night the panels were finished except for painting and application of the veneer trim on the large panels. Progress is being made!


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## lanwater (May 14, 2010)

DrPain said:


> *Scraping By*
> 
> (The Story So Far: Our Hero is constructing a built-in bed for his daughter, with inadequate tools and woodworking experience.)
> 
> ...


A couple of month ago I bought the hardware for a murphy's bed from Rockler. that bed was to go in the play room along with some bookcases. To make the story short, I screwed up on the mesurement. I got so upset I never did it. Maybe During christmas break.


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## DrPain (Sep 2, 2009)

DrPain said:


> *Scraping By*
> 
> (The Story So Far: Our Hero is constructing a built-in bed for his daughter, with inadequate tools and woodworking experience.)
> 
> ...


I seem to always mis-measure or mis-cut or otherwise stumble from my plans, so I have to be a little more accepting


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## DrPain (Sep 2, 2009)

*A Thin Veneer of Civilization*

*
*

After work today I headed for the garage/workshop to veneer the plywood edges of the large panels. But first I moved everything to the edges of the garage and swept out the sawdust and shavings. It was a sizable pile (with a few Fall leaves mixed in):










I trotted it out to the compost bin, which gets plenty of green waste but is always happy for a some atomized wood.



Each of the large panels for the built-in bed has three-ply thick raw edge like so:










Today's project was to veneer these edges. Fortunately 2" edge banding in 8 foot lengths is easily available and perfectly sized for this project. I've never done heat-melt veneering before (or any sort of veneering for that matter), so I was a little nervous. I searched Lumberjocks for tips but didn't find anything particularly enlightening. However, there was a fairly useful page at Joe Woodworker:

Joe Woodworker on Heat-Melt Veneering

Although he's talking about manual glue-up, it seemed to apply equally well to the pre-glued veneers. I used his recommended iron setting of "cotton" with a small amount of steam.

I prepared the veneer by rolling it backwards to flatten it out, and then taped it onto the raw edge with blue painter's tape. I wasn't sure how the tape would react to the iron, but the panel will be painted so I wasn't too worried about ruining the surface. (As it turned out, the tape came off easily but did leave some residue behind.)










I then ironed it and rolled it. The blue tape had a secondary benefit of marking out "sections" that I worked in sequence. That was a fairly good approach, although I did have trouble on the knee curve because the iron didn't fit very well along the curve. I managed by using the pointy nose of the iron.

After the ironing, I let the glue set while I took Madame President out for Chinese food.

After dinner, I trimmed the veneer using the Band-It veneer trimmer:










This worked okay, but I found I had to angle the trimmer into the cut to trim close to the wood. If I ran it flat along the wood as suggested it had a tendency to just bend the veneer over instead of cutting it. One side of the trimmer also flexed apart along one of the plastic seams. Overall not a terrible tool (and probably better than I could have done with a mat knife) but one that took a little twiddling to be effective.

The trimmer left some high points, but I was able to take those down fairly easily with my little bullnose plane. The result:










After trimming there was one loose edge on one of the panels, but I was able to fix that easily by re-ironing in that spot. Overall I'm pretty happy with the result (it being my first attempt at veneering) and it should look fine once it is painted. My wife's comment was "It's as good as Ikea!" which I'm still analyzing


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## spunwood (Aug 20, 2010)

DrPain said:


> *A Thin Veneer of Civilization*
> 
> *
> *
> ...


Cool stuff. I am making some doll beds soon which won't need veneer, but I had been wondering how the stuff works. Love the design.


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## DrPain (Sep 2, 2009)

DrPain said:


> *A Thin Veneer of Civilization*
> 
> *
> *
> ...


Thanks!


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## DrPain (Sep 2, 2009)

*Don't Mock Me!*

(The Story So Far: Our Hero is constructing a built-in bed for his daughter, with inadequate tools and woodworking experience, and so far has made only a small number of terrible errors, which fortunately he can blame on others.)

Just a short note today, because I haven't had time to make significant progress these last two days. I did get out and trim the two panels that make up one side of the built-in to the same width and cut the top and bottom pieces, as well as the one permanent shelf. That at least let me mock up the fit and look. I had to clamp the large panel to the woodworker's ever-handy aid: the garage door.










Hmm, it looks less impressive in a photo than it did in my imagination when I was slaving to build it . As a reminder, this is what the finished piece will look like:










So that mock-up is one end, minus the shelves and drawers.


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## rroades (Oct 16, 2008)

DrPain said:


> *Don't Mock Me!*
> 
> (The Story So Far: Our Hero is constructing a built-in bed for his daughter, with inadequate tools and woodworking experience, and so far has made only a small number of terrible errors, which fortunately he can blame on others.)
> 
> ...


It should look great! But remember my motto - it's not about the progress, it's about the INTENDED progress!


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## Splinterman (Mar 13, 2009)

DrPain said:


> *Don't Mock Me!*
> 
> (The Story So Far: Our Hero is constructing a built-in bed for his daughter, with inadequate tools and woodworking experience, and so far has made only a small number of terrible errors, which fortunately he can blame on others.)
> 
> ...


Hey Scott,
The little Lady will love it….take your time…..measure four times …..cut once….maybe..)


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## sras (Oct 31, 2009)

DrPain said:


> *Don't Mock Me!*
> 
> (The Story So Far: Our Hero is constructing a built-in bed for his daughter, with inadequate tools and woodworking experience, and so far has made only a small number of terrible errors, which fortunately he can blame on others.)
> 
> ...


You are making excellent progress - this is only going to look better as the details come together. A very creative design. I am looking forward to following the rest of the story!


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## DrPain (Sep 2, 2009)

DrPain said:


> *Don't Mock Me!*
> 
> (The Story So Far: Our Hero is constructing a built-in bed for his daughter, with inadequate tools and woodworking experience, and so far has made only a small number of terrible errors, which fortunately he can blame on others.)
> 
> ...


Thanks for the support! I love the time in a project when you start being able to see the final form.


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## DrPain (Sep 2, 2009)

*Paint and Pumpkin Pie*

Work on the built-in slowed to a crawl as we got to a serious painting phase. The painting sub-contractor started out enthusiastically, but after an initial coat of primer was nowhere to be found. It's so hard to find good help these days. I had to take over the painting-not my favorite activity but these panels are actually fairly easy to paint.










In this photo, the customer dropped in for an impromptu inspection. She approved of the quality of the painting, especially when I explained that the alternative was to paint it herself.

Painting also taught me a lesson about veneering. In a few places on the panel edge where I veneered there were small voids where the plywood that made up the inside of the sandwich was lower than the two sides. This was fine when I veneered, but the addition of paint (liquid) made the veneer bubble up in those places. It's a minor flaw, but it will bug me for the rest of my days, I'm sure. Next time I'll fill in any voids before veneering.

Another delay was incurred when we absconded to Phoenix for Thanksgiving with my parents, brother and sisters. Had a wonderful time with my family, and I was able to deliver some Drunken Cutting Boards to my brother and sister in thanks for all they've done for my parents this year:



But of course no work happened on the built-in while we were feasting and catching up, so first thing on our return it was out to the garage to sand and put on the last coat of paint.


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## FatherHooligan (Mar 27, 2008)

DrPain said:


> *Paint and Pumpkin Pie*
> 
> Work on the built-in slowed to a crawl as we got to a serious painting phase. The painting sub-contractor started out enthusiastically, but after an initial coat of primer was nowhere to be found. It's so hard to find good help these days. I had to take over the painting-not my favorite activity but these panels are actually fairly easy to paint.
> 
> ...


Looking good!


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## DrPain (Sep 2, 2009)

*Unexpected Visitors*

(The Story So Far: Our Hero is constructing a built-in bed for his daughter, with inadequate tools and woodworking experience, and so far has made only a small number of terrible errors, which fortunately he can blame on others.)

Thanksgiving break saw the family traveling out to Arizona for a family gathering. Much fun and merriment was had by all, and we took advantage of the break to crack the windows in the garage and let the paint dry thoroughly and finish outgassing. When we returned, we discovered that some unexpected visitors had come to inspect the work and take up residence in the invitingly warm piles of wood shavings: a pair of Carolina Wrens.










Of course it proved impossible to gently direct them back out the open window, so I had to move all the panels and rearrange everything in order to open the garage door for the ten seconds it took them to escape. I'm always surprised by how many encounters with wildlife seem to come up on LJs.

The panels are more-or-less completed, awaiting transportation up to the customer's bedroom for assembly into the basic carcase. However, the larger panels will require two men to move, so we're waiting on the return of our neighbor from his Thanksgiving vacation. He's not aware that he's coming back to a moving job … 

In the meantime, I decided to get to work building out the bed platform. It's a basic frame of 1×3s, with slats to support the mattress and some dividers for support and to hold the runners for the drawers that will go underneath the bed.










I decided to construct the frame with dowels, and I was reminded the doweling is a wonderful woodworking technique. With a doweling jig and pre-made dowels, it's a foolproof, fast and easy way to make strong and accurate joints. I generally only use it on "rough" construction like the bed frame, but I probably should expand my use of it to more situations. I forgot a cross-piece on one of the frame ends and had to fit it in afterward with pocket screws, and it was so annoying after an evening of doweling. Maybe it's just me, but pocket screwed joints seem to always pull out of alignment at the last moment, even when I have them clamped down with a face frame clamp. That's not a problem I ever have with dowels.



















Here are the two ends to the bed frame assembled. (The poor insulation panel has seen better days at this point!) Making the rest of the frame should be straightforward but time-consuming. I make my bed slats with a "V" cut in each end to register on pins in the bed frame. That keeps the slats from sliding around while still leaving them easy to remove, but it does take a while to cut all the slats and sink the pins.


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## DrPain (Sep 2, 2009)

*Site Work Begins*

(The Story So Far: Our Hero is constructing a built-in bed for his daughter, with inadequate tools and woodworking experience. Work has slowed to a crawl thanks to the holidays and countless other demands on his time…)

My neighbor returned from his vacation and was immediately drafted into helping move the panels for the built-in bed upstairs to the customer's bedroom. Well, not immediately. First I went over to his house to help him re-assemble and move a dining room table. Cleverly, this placed him in my debt, for a return favor.

The panels got upstairs and then all work ground to a halt as various other more important activities interrupted. And by "more important" I mean more important to Madame President, who (since her win in the mid-term elections) sets the agenda. Currently that involves a lot of Christmas activities, and other such folderol.

Eventually I carved out an hour block of time to work on assembling one of the side units. I can't say this went entirely well. The plan was to pocket hole the top and bottom of the side unit into the panels. This plan almost immediately went awry when I inadvertently used screws for 3/4" thick material on the 1/2" thick bottom; the screw went through the side panel and into the hardwood flooring.










On the positive side, this made for a very sturdy joint. On the negative side, my blood pressure went up several points and my children's vocabulary was expanded by several words.

I backed out those screws and tried the correct length, but of course they didn't hold in the plywood side panels. So I had to drill a new set of pocket holes. I whipped those off and tried again with the proper length of screws. These still didn't hold very well. There just wasn't enough sturdy material in the plywood side panel with only about a 1/4" of penetration.

It's this sort of thing that makes projects take twice as long as planned .

I put everything aside for an afternoon of superfluous holiday activities, and somewhere along the line my subconscious informed my conscious brain that what I really needed was thicker bottoms and tops to the side units, and that there was no real reason they had to be 1/2" thick, since they're both hidden. With this revelation in hand the solution seemed obvious. I sandwiched another ply of 1/2" thick plywood onto the top and the bottom to make a 1" thick piece that I could pocket hole in more securely with much longer screws.

And indeed, that worked just fine. With the addition of one fixed shelf and a back to hold everything square, the side unit was very sturdy and looks good so far. Here's the customer providing scale:










I have yet to assemble the second side unit, and I need to put the kick plate and top piece on this one. After that the plan is to build the bed platform and put everything into place. Shelves and drawers can then be completed at a leisurely pace.


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## sras (Oct 31, 2009)

DrPain said:


> *Site Work Begins*
> 
> (The Story So Far: Our Hero is constructing a built-in bed for his daughter, with inadequate tools and woodworking experience. Work has slowed to a crawl thanks to the holidays and countless other demands on his time…)
> 
> ...


Looks like everything is moving along nicely - especially with everything else going on. Looking good!


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## DrPain (Sep 2, 2009)

*Two Down and ... None to Go*

(The Story So Far: Our Hero is constructing a built-in bed for his daughter, and has recently reached the point where his efforts are starting to look like they might, in the end, work out.)

Amazingly there was nothing on the agenda after work tonight, so following dinner I took a helper upstairs and finished the second side unit for the bed. One or two slight mishaps during assembly but nothing significant.










In this picture the bed is the wrong way. The real bed will go lengthwise between the two units and come out just to the front edge (with drawers below). But until we get a few minutes to rearrange some furniture there isn't room to turn the bed the right way.


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## FatherHooligan (Mar 27, 2008)

DrPain said:


> *Two Down and ... None to Go*
> 
> (The Story So Far: Our Hero is constructing a built-in bed for his daughter, and has recently reached the point where his efforts are starting to look like they might, in the end, work out.)
> 
> ...


Isn't it amazing how time just disappears…The scads of 'other things' that slow down a project.

It looks like you are continuing to make progress though…keep on trucking, it'll get done.


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## DrPain (Sep 2, 2009)

*A Return to the Shop*

*(The Story So Far: Our Hero is constructing a built-in bed for his daughter, with inadequate tools and woodworking experience. Work has resumed after a holiday break.)*

I've spent some time over the last few weeks building the bed frame and the shelves for the bookcase units. That work is mostly done, and parts are being test-fitted and painted on the "play room" side of our basement.










I have some concerns about the sturdiness of the bed frame, so I've been amending the design to include some more bracing and a plywood back to help keep it stiff and square. On the two rails on the left side of the above picture, you can see the dowels which will be used to keep the bed slats in place. I recently realized that this bed doesn't break down, so there's really no need to make the bed slats easily removable. I could have just as well screwed them down to the rails. I may still do that for some of them for the aforementioned sturdiness reasons.

In the meantime, I decided to make the decorative cut out for the top of the bookcase units. I actually decided to do this some time ago, but I was relying on Madame President to draw the design, and she procrastinated. (Also, I gave her the wrong dimensions the first time around.) Tonight I gave her a stern talking-to and she finally produced the design.

I've been interested in this part of the project because I planned to make these pieces by template routing, a skill I've never exercised before. So when Madame President had finished the design, I headed down to the workshop to make a hardboard template




























Once the template was completed, I traced it onto one of the blanks and rough cut it with a jigsaw. I find my jigsaw very frustrating to use, because there's a lot of blade deflection regardless of what I'm cutting, how thick a blade I use, or how slowly I cut. I wonder if I just need a better jigsaw. I have a small Skil model that seems sturdy enough. Would a better jigsaw help, do you think? Or do have recommendations for better blades?

The rough cutting done, I headed over to the router table. The only top bearing trim bits I had were 1/2" (too small) and 2 1/2" (huge!). I bought the big bit when I was planning to template rout the knee curve in the big side walls of the bookcase units, which were 1 1/2" thick. I ended up doing that job with a scraper.
The big bit was almost too big for my router table. Even on the lowest setting I had to re-seat the bit once to get it low enough for the bearing to bear on the template. Once I got that issue settled I taped on the template with double-side carpet tape and had at it.










The actual routing was somewhat anticlimactic. A few little challenges, but nothing too major. The first piece was intended just as a test / practice for the real pieces, but it turned out just fine. The 1/2" radius of the trim bit didn't get too far into the sharp corners, so I used the jigsaw again to clean those up. Next time I may just pull out a handsaw. Here it is after a little bit of clean up with the files and sandpaper.










(A nice thing about painted projects is that you can make notes right on the pieces!) I'm happy this went well; I'm planning on something similar to make the decorative drawer fronts and I'm a little more worried about that. Hopefully tomorrow I'll knock off the other decorative top and can move on to installing the shelves and the bed frame.

(My browser crashed three times while I was writing this… grrr!)


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## live4ever (Feb 27, 2010)

DrPain said:


> *A Return to the Shop*
> 
> *(The Story So Far: Our Hero is constructing a built-in bed for his daughter, with inadequate tools and woodworking experience. Work has resumed after a holiday break.)*
> 
> ...


Looking good! I'm sure the bed will look great when the hero is done with it. BTW, is there a villain?


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## DrPain (Sep 2, 2009)

DrPain said:


> *A Return to the Shop*
> 
> *(The Story So Far: Our Hero is constructing a built-in bed for his daughter, with inadequate tools and woodworking experience. Work has resumed after a holiday break.)*
> 
> ...


@live4ever-Not so far. The villain may turn up in the third and final act


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## DrPain (Sep 2, 2009)

*Woodworkus Interruptus*

*(The Story So Far: Our Hero is constructing a built-in bed for his daughter, with inadequate tools and woodworking experience. Work has resumed after a holiday break.)*

I came home from work tonight all set to get into the workshop and make some progress. But I found a note directing me to come speak with Madame President, who was next door sipping wine and gossiping with our neighbor. When I got there I was informed that Her Gloriousness was interested in dining out and seeing a movie. That called for some intense bargaining and in the end we settled on calling out for pizza. So I was able to descend to the workshop after all.

During my scant time in the workshop I was interrupted for the following reasons:

1. To look at glassware on MP's netbook.
2. To unclog the upstairs toilet.
3. To explain Bernoulli's Principle and how airfoils work.
4. To drive through the neighborhood whistling for our errant dog.

And once when someone was "looking for something."

Despite this, I managed to get a little work done. I finished off the decorative top pieces I started in the last blog entry-they seemed too low for proper balance in the final piece, so I jointed up an edge and glued on an additional 1×4 to add some more visual weight to the top of the piece. A test fitting looked good, so I sanded them and slathered them with primer.

The next task was to put together a prototype drawer. I had purchased some 1/2" x 8 stock from Big Box Store a few days ago for this purpose. For Christmas Santa brought me a Rockler dovetailing jig. I've done dovetails by hand but never by machine, and since I wasn't looking forward to doing 9 drawers of hand dovetails, I was intending to figure out the jig.

I'd already run into some problems with jig. The Rockler jig uses a template guide for the router, and of course I own a Bosch router, which doesn't have the standard fitting. Fortunately I'd noticed this around Christmas time when I read through the manual, so I had already received the adapter I needed.

I ran into more problems setting up the router. The Rockler jig uses bits with 8 mm shanks, and comes with an 8 mm sleeve to fit inside a 1/2" collet. I hadn't noticed this when I read through the manual, or I might have picked up an 8 mm collet at the same time I got the template adapter. At any rate, I put the router into my plunge base (my fixed base is installed in my router table), put on the template adapter, template, 1/2" collet, 8 mm sleeve, and dovetailing bit, and then attempted to tighten it all up. Well, actually, I succeeded in tightening it all up rather too well, because after I was done the whole setup was frozen solid, with the collet jammed tight down into the template, the dovetail bit jammed into the other side of the template, and the plunge frozen.

I loosened up the collet but nothing released. I took a wrench and carefully pulled on the bit, but it wouldn't release. I unscrewed the template but still nothing moved. I released the template adapter, also with no luck. It was really jammed together.

Somewhat at a loss as to what to do, I took my rubber mallet and gave the base a few whacks to see if I could break free whatever was stuck. I did, with a vengeance. The base sprung out and launched bit and template across the room.

I gathered up all the parts and found I was missing the 8 mm sleeve. I swept up the shop, dug around behind the bench, but couldn't find it. Finally I discovered it lodged in the bottom of the router where the collet attaches. And I couldn't budge it. I dug around a bit with a screwdriver with no luck. It appeared that I could disassemble the router if I could find a thin wrench of the right size, but I really didn't want to try that. I wondered if I could put the collet back on and catch it or dislodge it, and while I was pondering this I noticed that the collet was missing the internal compression fitting. It turned out that was still lodged in the router as well, and the sleeve was lodged in that. Fortunately the compression fitting was still sticking out of the router, so I was able to grab it with a wrench and pull both things out.

Pfew!

The 1/2" collet seems to be worse for the wear-the compression fitting no longer stays inside the nut. The 8 mm sleeve also had to be loosened up again-it has gotten permanently closed enough to prevent the bit from entering. Despite that I was able to reassemble everything and get it installed in the router without freezing the whole mass solid. I'm not sure what I did wrong the first time, but at least I avoided it the second time around!

That fun behind me, I set about poring over the manual, setting up the jig and making various test cuts. That was all fairly straightforward and easy, at least once I got past a certain amount of ambiguity in the first step. The only challenge was compensating for my odd (Bosch-sized) router plate, although strangely enough it ended up using the same settings as the Porter-Cable, possibly because the Bosch router plate has a flat side instead of being entirely circular.

I had already cut my drawer pieces to size, so practice dovetails behind me I set about routing the prototype drawer. I experimented a bit with different router speeds, but at least for these pieces (fairly soft pine), faster seemed better.

Once I had the dovetail joints routed, I broke everything down and moved my router to the table to rout the rabbet for the drawer bottom. I didn't want the rabbet to show in the finished drawers, so this was an opportunity to practice stopped rabbets as well. After the rabbets were done I switched to the jigsaw and block plane to cut off the rabbet entirely on the back piece.

Next I cut the drawer bottom from some 1/4" plywood I had left-over from building the bookcase units. This is where I made my first mistake. Rather than assembling the drawer and taking measurements directly from the drawer, I calculated the drawer bottom size. I didn't take into account that the half-blind dovetails only result in a partial overlap of the pieces in one direction. In this case, I ended up cutting the drawer bottom about a 1/2" too narrow. When I dry fitted it, it just barely extended into the rabbets along the drawer sides.

Doing the assembly I noticed the second mistake. I'd reversed the pins and tails for the dovetails between the sides and front/back, so that dovetails showed in the front and back rather than on the sides.

Well, that's why I did a prototype .

Here it is sitting on the bench:










Overall I'm pretty happy that I can execute the actual drawers now. I'm a little bothered that 1/2" stock is difficult/impossible to find; it seems very wasteful to buy 3/4" stock and immediately plane away a third of the wood. I'm going to make four of the drawers out of 1/2" 'craft' stock from the Big Box Store even though it would be cheaper to buy 3/4" and plane it down.


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## lilredweldingrod (Nov 23, 2009)

DrPain said:


> *Woodworkus Interruptus*
> 
> *(The Story So Far: Our Hero is constructing a built-in bed for his daughter, with inadequate tools and woodworking experience. Work has resumed after a holiday break.)*
> 
> ...


You need a bouncer stationed at the door. And make sure he is a trained dog catcher.


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## sras (Oct 31, 2009)

DrPain said:


> *Woodworkus Interruptus*
> 
> *(The Story So Far: Our Hero is constructing a built-in bed for his daughter, with inadequate tools and woodworking experience. Work has resumed after a holiday break.)*
> 
> ...


Sounds like your prototype paid for itself! Thanks for the update.


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## DrPain (Sep 2, 2009)

*Drawers & Fronts*

*
*

I don't think I've posted a picture of the bookcase sides with shelves and the decorative top piece installed. Here's what they look like:










You can see that they're already in use.

With my practice drawer out of the way and fairly successful, I moved on to building the first four drawers for the built-in. These are all 6" tall and 15×20 inches, so I can conveniently make them from 1/2" stock from the local Big Box Store. The quality of this stock is actually pretty good; it's generally straight and uniform in thickness. Sometimes an edge is banged up, but this can be concealed on the bottom of the drawer.

Out came the chop saw and the dovetailing jig and a few hours later I had a stack of drawers.










No real problems - the first few joints were loose in one way or another so I tweaked the setup and the rest were fine. Then it was on to cutting the rabbet for the drawer bottom. (I'm using 1/4" birch plywood for the bottoms.) I'd realized after doing the practice drawer that since I was using plywood for the bottoms and half-blind dovetails, I could do a four-side rabbet and bury the rabbet in a tail. So I set up a 1/4" straight bit in the router table and ran off 16 rabbets.










Then it was time to assemble the drawers. This was a little trickier than I expected. With a four-side rabbet and a trapped bottom, the glue up becomes a little cumbersome and I kept getting drops of glue on the drawer sides. There was also another slight problem, which I'll get to in a minute. Here's a picture of one of the assembled drawers.










Now, if you have a keen eye for woodworking, you may notice an unusual feature on this drawer, namely that it seems to have a rabbet on the outside top of the drawer side. Sadly, it does. After I'd finished rabbeting all the sides, I discovered that I'd rabbeted the wrong face of the drawer sides.

Sigh.

Fortunately the 6" height of the drawers goes evenly into the number of tails on my dovetailing jig, so I was able to flip each board over and end for end and still assemble the drawers. This puts the first incorrect rabbet on the top outside of each drawer side as shown above. Later I'll put a thin runner over each rabbet and call it a design feature .

The front of each drawer is going to have a decorative molding. I mocked it up in SketchUp and it looks like this:










These drawers will have a roughly 7"x16" front, so I was able to design the moulding out of 1×3 and 1×2 stock with a minimum of cutouts.

I'm making the side pieces with their half-moons by template routing. Here is the template and some practice pieces being rough-cut:










And here they are again after being routed and drilled out for dowels:










And finally, glued up:










I got a little sloppy and didn't keep track of how I laid out the dowels, so I think I ended up with one of the rails swapped end for end or side for side. You can see a fairly ugly mismatch on the bottom right corner. No matter, really, because this piece is just for practice and sizing.

Tomorrow when the glue-up is dry I'll get out an ogee bit and rout the inside of the molding and present it to Madame President for her approval.


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## DrPain (Sep 2, 2009)

*Drawer Fronts*

*(The Story So Far: Our Hero is constructing a built-in bed for his daughter, with inadequate tools and woodworking experience. He has recently moved on to the drawer-building phase.)*

Over the weekend I found time to install the top two drawers into the bookcase ends of the built-in. I used these drawer slides from Woodworker's Hardware, and I can recommend them to anyone looking for cheaper but well-made drawer slides. As far as I can tell, these are identical to the much more expensive "Accuride" drawer slides. And they're about 1/4 the price.

I did learn an important lesson: if you're going to build a piece of furniture that will require you to get inside of it to install drawers, make the piece more than 16 inches wide . I did manage to wedge myself in backwards and upside down and contorted in all sorts of ways to do the installation, but it was a tiring few hours!

Come to think of it, I learned another important lesson. But I'll need a photo I don't have to illustrate that lesson, so maybe next time.

The drawers installed, I moved on to making the drawer fronts. The drawer fronts consist of a routed molding mounted on a face plate. In the last blog entry I'd assembled a prototype of the molding, so now I routed out an ogee and put a backing plate onto it to see how the design looked:










I was pretty happy with how it turned out, and so was the client and Madame President. I did decide that the ogee I had was a bit small, and I ended up using a bigger cove and bead bit.

So it was time for a production run of drawer front moldings. First I roughed out the end pieces with a jigsaw.










Then I put the template on each end piece in turn and routed it to the pattern and then rough sanded the transitions.










Then I glued up the end pieces with the rails (using dowels), and when they had dried, cleaned them up with handplanes and a sander:










Finally I put the cove & bead bit on the router and (using numerous passes) cut the decorative edge to the moldings:










And that's where I left off for the evening. Next up I need to cut the face plates to put behind the moldings, glue it up and then paint them to match the bookcase ends.


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