My daughter is getting older and this is a bit hard to get my brain around. She is about 2 1/2 years old at this point and is about ready for a new bed. We’ve been using a wonderful hand-me-down crib from my sister for the last few years. I had this idea to do something more personal and custom for her next bed than just picking up an ikea or baby’s r us toddler bed, so i decided to build on from scratch.

I’ve been watching several wood working youtubers, Steve Ramsey(Wood working for mere mortals), Frank Howarth, and April Wilkerson. Watching their videos made me believe that normal people could do these things with a certain amount of infrastructure and some bravery.

So i did a little googling to find some reasonable plans for the bed. There are a great many makers in the world with beautiful projects and their plans readily available. I found plans by Ana White that looked executable and very clear for a novice to be able to follow. The plans are available here.

Having stared at the plans for a few weeks and building up the nerve to spend the money and try to do this, I finally broke the ice by buying the couple of tools I didn’t have already. I bought a Kreg K4 Pocket hole jig which seemed to be the standard tool used by both Steve and April above. I got the mid-level one because it had the integrated clamp to hold the work piece and it seemed a bit more idiot proof than the less expensive kits they sold. It came with everything I needed, so it was really time to buy some wood and start construction.

The plans came with a shopping list which amounted to about 35 bucks worth of wood.

Then i started to work through the cut list with a cross cut sled i had built from watching Steve Ramsey. It allowed me to use the table saw i have a little safer and much more consistently for the cross cuts i had to do. Throw a stop block into place and all you have to do is line up the next piece and cut. Most of the pieces in the build were 27 1/2 inches long so it saved me a lot of time and effort cutting them down

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Turned out that cutting the wood down to size was probably the quickest part of the build.

Next i had to drill all of the pocket holes appropriately… This took a bit more trail and error than I expected as i both didn’t read the instructions carefully enough on this bit from either the plans for the bed or the Kreg jig. I did some test holes in some scraps to play with how it worked and once i got the hang of it I went into production mode setting up the jig on my cross cut sled / workbench.

After that, it was assembly time. It all went together pretty easily, though I didn’t learn until later in the build process that i should clamp my work pieces before trying to put screws in them for the joining. I also learned I again don’t read or look at diagrams thoroughly enough sometimes. The plans call for the joints between the 2×2 legs and the 1×6 side rails and foot board to be joined on the inside edge and the headboard joined on the outside edge. so I had to re-screw all of those pocket hole screws.

More than likely a more video of all of this will be out shortly, this is mostly my notes from the process.

I got to play with a counter sink bit and pre-drilled all of the slats for the bed to have the screws for those below the surface and set up a jig for doing that quickly and consistently.

Once everything was assembled, It was time to sand the ever loving crap out of it. I bought a Random Orbit Sander last year from Dewalt and got my first chance to really use it. I rounded over all of the top edges on everything with an 80 grit sandpaper and then followed that up with 150 on everything to make it nice and smooth and ready for paint.

The paint I used was color that I had already used in her room for the silhouette on the wall of her Lion King Mural we did while getting her room ready for her while my wife was pregnant. The other color you’ll see in the pictures is also from this mural, one of the shades of white/yellow from the background that I had a still use-able quart of.

It covered pretty well as it was a Behr Primer and Paint all-in-one that I bought, but I still ended up doing 2 coats with some light sanding between them.

Once I had it all assembled and painted it was time to turn my attention to the “creative” part of the project, the headboard. The plans call for a simple design with just a bit of a arch across the top. I decided this was the place I could add a little personalization for my Daughter. So first I made a template in Photoshop of what i wanted it to look at a 1:1 scale, so i could print it out and cut/paint according to it.

This image prints across 5 pieces of paper to fill the 27.5 inch by 6 inch surface. I glued this to the 1×6 piece of wood and then cut out the “white” parts in the image leaving about a 2 inch solid wood strip across the piece and 1/2 of the letters cut out of the wood. I sanded the edges and painted the entire thing with the base brown paint used on everything else. a few sand/paint cycles later I had a reasonably well painted piece.

I then masked the lower half of the painted wood off and taped a new copy of the stencil to the wood and cut out the letters / masking tape leaving holes shaped like the letters in the masking tape. I painted the letters with the accent white/yellow color i mentioned earlier. This took a few coats to get nice and then i sprayed on a few thin coats of clear polyurethane.

The last thing i had to do was cut / paint the headboards body which would be 2 sided in my case. Another of those opportunities to customize. On the one side was bead board that matched the wanescot in her bedroom. This was painted with the accent yellow the letters were done in. On the back of the bed, since it wasn’t going to live it’s life against the wall, I cut, glued, and framed with some molding a piece of whiteboard panel. You can buy both whiteboard and chalkboard panels at Home Depot in 2ft x 4ft pieces. So it will act as a sort of eisel for her.

With that all cut and painted, it was time for final assembly and installation. a bit of glue and some staples to hold the backer on to the wood and it was complete. We brought it in and set it up for Josie’s nap today and she’s sleeping like an angel in it as i type this.

A pretty fun and satisfying project. I learned a good amount about wood working in the process and I can’t wait to start my next project… Cleaning up the garage after making a complete mess of it doing this one.

I’ve got about 20 hours of video on this project (lots of timelapses of things being done) that I’m putting together. I will add a post linking to the video once that is done, but I wanted to get this out of my mind so I could share it before i struggle through the video process.

John