I’m slowly getting into building more and more useful furniture projects. This project is actually for my granddaughter and is her first ‘big girl’ bed.
I started with some great looking v-notch (tongue and groove) pine boards that I get from a local company. I love the way these boards look and use them in a lot of projects that require large panels. Between the knotty wood and the texture that the v-notches provide, It’s hard to go wrong with these boards, unless you don’t use enough glue. I promise, I only did that once.
Once the headboard and footboard panels were glued up I had to create the 3×3 posts out of a pair of bonded 2x4s. I didn’t want to deal with the eventual twisting and warping that I expect to happen with pretty much every piece of pine out there these days. To help counter that problem I make sure to glue up the 2x4s with the grain structure set so that the boards fight with each other to maintain “straightness”.
For the long rails I started with standard 2×6 boards and planed them down to give me 1.25×5 inch boards. And because I prefer not to use a lot of metal in my projects, I cut basic mortise and tenon ends to put the rails through the posts. I had intended to make them with wedges to secure them, but ended up very short on time to get this done and ended up pinning the joints to secure them.
The headboard was built with movable shelves so that she could create spaces for her special toys. And have them in arms reach any time that she needs them.
At some point I plan to remake the rails. I’ll probably do them in hardwood this time just to make the tenons longer and make them wedges rather than the pins I used this time. Of course that means making plugs to fill in the holes there now, but I’m cool with that. It’ll be fun making those tenons when the mortises are 900 miles away.
