furniture building + upgrade.

So I am starting a little project building a bed for Julian. He is excited. So am I. Let's see ... maybe five years or so ago I built a bookshelf which turned out OK but was nothing to really show off. And that rounds out my furniture-building experience.

So this will be an experience in and of itself. I am trying to build this bed -

Based on these plans from the knockoffwood blog. In a full-size. I figure as long as I'm building J a bed, I might as well build one that he can grow into. I don't plan on building him another.

But - this is in preparation for building my own bed which will be a king with a canopy so this is good practice. If it turns out (big 'if') I will be slightly more confident in being able to pull off building a king-sized bed.

Now Ana (the writer of knockoffwood) claims the lumber is fifty bucks. Well, for even the crappiest, knottiest pine it'd cost just a little over a hundred bucks (for a full - and she was quoting for a twin to be fair). However, I'm not really going for the 'rustic' look and want this to look pretty much like the Land of Nod version so I bucked up and got much nicer pine (which was still slightly cheaper than fir, came in more dimensions, and definitely cheaper than hemlock which is still a soft wood). Which cost me about $250 and required trips to a couple different places (Lowe's for the bulk of the nice pine stock and a local lumber yard for some harder-to-find stuff like 3x3 VG fir posts and 1/2x6"x8' stock). I am modifying her plans slightly to make it (IMO) slightly nicer-looking - using 1/2" stock on the headboard and footboard cross-sectional pieces instead of 1" stuff, going to try to notch the 2x4" supports that attach to the inside of the bedrails so the rails attach a little closer to the center of the bedposts, and going from 4x4" to 3x3" posts cos the 4x ones just look too beefy even though I spent about a half-hour combing through the pallet of 4x4 fir posts at Lowe's only to go back and return them. Oh well. I want this to look as nice as possible.

And today I found this great post on a totally different site (but linked from the knockoffwood blog) about how to treat pine prior to staining. Totally pertinent, since I'll be trying to stain pine as dark as the bed in the photo above. We'll see how that works out.

Like I said about this whole project - big 'if.'

But - the reason for this post, not only to mention my plans to build a bed, was to highlight an upgrade I made to my DeWalt 12" compound double-bevel miter saw (wow, that's a mouthfull). Two words: laser sight.

I figured before I start a project like building a bed I owed it to myself to make it a little easier on myself. But after reading that finishing post, now I am realizing I should have splurged for a variable-speed orbital sander (mine's just an orbital - no control of speed) for when it gets to the finishing stages. Hopefully I don't destroy all the pine in the process of sanding.

But - we'll see how this all goes. It'll be fun. If it turns out. The alternative is - if it does not - cutting the legs of J's Ikea loft bed to make it into a twin instead of trying to sell it on craigslist. But in the meantime crossing my fingers ...