I Built a Bed!

My first item that I can cross out on my 30 before Thirty list!
Item number 12:  Build a beautiful bed for Rory.

Around ten months ago, I discovered ana-white.com (formally knock-off wood).  She draws up furniture plans based on expensive furniture, you know P. Barn and the like. She tells you how much wood to buy, what cuts to make and how to put it together step by step.  Oh, and completely free! Every plan she comes up with is awesome and I want to build it.  But my house is only so big, and we really don’t need the furniture.  However, the time was coming when Rory was going to outgrow her toddler bed that we made her.  I fell in love with the Lydia daybed.  So stinking adorable!

While discussing my plans with my brother, Alan, he informed me that he could help.  He owns a machine shop.  He also has lots of large machines that do all sorts of cool things.  One in particular is a CNC Router.  We went to his shop with the printed out plans in hand.  He uses large MDF board under the parts he is making.  He also had some extra.  So we just cut up all the boards I needed using MDF.  It was so cool!  I even added some personal touches to the bed.

First, he had to program in all the sizes of boards we needed.

Next, the machine cutting out the pieces.  We were taking some out as they were being cut to check them, hence the missing pieces.

Here’s all the wood stacked up.

My favorite part!  Sanding them down.  Ignore the goofy face.

I know this is a jump, but once I got started building, it was hard to stop to take pictures.  But here’s the bed mostly assembled with putty filling the screw holes. Next comes sanding and painting.

Alan measuring to see if we had to take it apart to fit in the house so we didn’t have to disassemble it.  And yes, yes we did. [Notice the messy garage.  Number 7 on 30 b4 30.]

Rory helped paint the bed… And the garage walls, floors and her flip flops.

And… Here’s the finished bed!

I can’t wait to build some more stuff!