a bed.

We've been on a kick lately, finding cool things at salvage yards, used furniture stores, and the new Habitat For Humanity store in town. In addition to that $18 lamp, we found a bed. It was an old oak bed, similar in style to the bed I built J years ago.

I've never owned a bed, actually.

In fact, there was a time - when K and I actually met in fact - where my 'bed' was (seriously) a pile of sheetrock -

Maybe a little hard to see in that photo (the pile of sheetrock is wrapped in black plastic), but that was a real deal. Also hard to tell in that photo, but my bedroom at the time didn't have any walls. Well, it had walls, but it was bare studs. Pretty awesome.

Fast-forward a few years...

The bed came in pieces, but the gal at Habitat For Humanity was nice and gave me three scraps of 1x lumber to use as cross-braces. I had to rip them all down to 3-5/8" and then cut them to 60-1/2" in length, but that was easy. I also had to find the bolts that fit the nuts that were embedded in the headboard and footboard. That... was not easy. It actually took three trips to the hardware store where - on the third trip - I literally shoved the footboard into the trunk of my car and took it to the flippin' store. I was not going to make a fourth trip.

(Turned out - the bolt was metric, M7 to be exact, of which the store only had about five bolts of various sizes - none that would work with the bedframe as it was so I'd have to get creative... )

So I drilled a second hole on each end of the two side rails -

The longest bolt was maybe 2" in length (it was metric, and I can't recall the length) - and I had to use a couple of washers and a nut as a spacer to fit the bolt and be able to tighten it. Thankfully, it worked - and after an hour or so I had the bed put together -

Then I had to fit the cross-braces I ripped and cut down to length -

I drilled them -

Then screwed them in to help solidify the bed -

On the middle brace I cut a length of scrap 4x4 to use as a support -

And it was finished -

Then it was just a matter of hauling the box frame, mattress, and all our bedding (K had washed and starched the sheets) back in and put it all together -

Finally... I'm a grown-up (K had already owned a bed, although remarked how now our bedroom feels more 'grown-up').