There are certain pieces of furniture in a house that are essential and one of these is a bed. It doesn't matter what kind of bed, be it single, double, Queen or even King-sized, but the fact of the matter is, everybody sleeps on a bed of some type for usually for a good 6-8 hours every day. With a piece of furniture so essential to everyday living, wouldn't it be great if you could save the high cost of buying this bed by learning how to make one for yourself using woodworking bed plans.
Well there's no reason why you can't do this nowadays as there are a multitude of woodworking plans on the market allowing you to create any manner of bespoke furniture items for your house.
In this article we'll quickly run through the process for creating a bed from scratch using woodwork plans, so that you too can make a saving on a bed of your design.
Now obviously this quick run through is designed to explain the straightforward nature of building a bed from simple materials, but as you progress in confidence you'll be able to change elements in any set of plans and create a unique piece of furniture.
If we start by taking a look at the wood, we would advise using MDF (medium density fibreboard) for the bed as this will give it an overall strength. For your army of tools you'll require saws, sanding machines or paper and ideally a jigsaw plus nail gun, although obviously you can start with the more manual tools like a simple hammer, but you will find a small investment in tools will make all of your woodwork projects much easier time and effort wise.
Don't forget other sundries including nails, screws, adhesives, filler and spackle to cover over thin cracks in the wood joints.
If we take a Queen-sized bed as standard, the dimensions measure eight by four feet. Take a piece of MDF and build the headboard first, this should measure four feet in width to match the bed frame, but the height is up to you, although we would suggest two to three feet in height.
After you have your headboard it is time to build the sides and footboard, also by using MDF. Depending on the look of your bed, you could design the footboard along similar lines to the headboard dimension wise, as long as it also measures four feet in width. The sideboards should obviously be eight feet in length.
By utilising a powered jigsaw, the above steps should be quick and painless and if you're feeling fancy you can even cut the top and tail boards to include curved edges. Use your sand/emery paper or sanding machine to smooth out any rough edges.
Attach the sideboards to the headboard and footboard using small screws and some wood adhesive, being careful not to crack the wood by using screws which are too big. Next we do the outer trims, which should again be cut using the same dimensions as the bed. Attach these to the bed frame.
Now we move on to the slats which add stability to the bed. Cut a dozen of these pieces and attach them between the sideboards at regular even intervals. These can be screwed to the bed frame using small screws. If you have small joint cracks you can apply some of the filler/adhesive/spackle you bought to fill these in.
Always perform a strength check at this point as any inherent weaknesses will be amplified at the finished stage by loose joints or cracked wood during the building process. The slats and connected bed frame should be able to take your full adult weight spread evenly over the entire bed. Although people often stand on beds, this is only on top of the mattress which evenly distributes the weight across all of the slats.
If you find any weaknesses or cracked wooden beams, remove and replace these parts and ensure all connections and joints are tight.
Your bed frame should now be complete, all you need to do is drop on the mattress and duvet and fix those hospital corners and the bed is ready for some serious sleeping.
Creating a simple bed is really that simple, although clearly any woodworking bed plans you use or purchase will go into much greater detail, but hopefully this article has allayed any fears about the possibility of building your own bed from scratch.
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