Platform Bed: Part 1

We have had quite a bit of rain the past few days her in the ROC, which has caused some problems for us. With the break we had in it today, we cleaned out all of the junk in our gutters, sealed some of the edges, and noticed the debris sitting on top of the roof. My husband and I have decided that that huge maple tree, as lovely as it is, needs to go. We need to prolong the roof of our house, and to do that, we are going to dig deep into our pockets and have someone come to remove it. This will open our back yard up to a lot of sun and give us piece of mind that it won't fall onto our home or our neighbors home.
We decided that today we would start our next big DIY project to personalize our home. We have decided that the bedroom set that I have had for the past five years will stay in the bedroom downstairs and be our guest bedroom. We are building a king sized platform bed all from scratch to go in our master suite upstairs. It will take a lot of time and patience, and is a little costly, but it's a project that we both can work on together and spend some quality time with one another.
Today we started working on the base. If you are going to undertake this project on your own, I highly recommend figuring out where you are going to put the frame because most of it will need to be built in place.

Materials:
* Six 2x10x8's
* 1 box of deck screws (1" should suffice)
* 12 metal joints
* Foam brushes
* Stain of your choice
* Polyurethane

Tools Needed:
*Miter Saw
*Circular Saw
*Power drill

Step 1: You first need to cut the pieces of wood into the sizes you need. Simple enough. We went ahead and had the fine people at home depot make the cuts for us for the pure fact that we needed to fit it into my accent hatchback to get it home. We had two of the 2x10x8's cut to 69" and the other four were cut to 65". The scraps are going to be used for support beams.
                   

Step 2: Figure out what pieces you want to use that you will see on the outside. These are the ones that you are going to stain. We chose to have a few with eyes and knots to give the piece some character.
             We simply propped them on top of some benches we have in the yard and put paper underneath to protect them. If you have some rough edges, you might want to sand them down a little bit, but the pieces we chose were nice and smooth so I chose to skip that step. Don't shake the stain up before you open in, open the can and stir it. if you shake it, you are going to get a lot of bubbles in the mix and it becomes sort of a pain to use. With a foam brush, distribute the stain evenly to apply a thin coat. The thicker the coat, the longer it is going to take to dry. Let that dry and then you can decide if you want to apply another coat or not. The dry time really depends on the humidity. For the first coat, it took about 2 hours. For the second one, it took about 4 hours. We actually decided to move them onto our side porch because the dry time took longer than anticipated.

                                    

Step 3: Once the stain is dry, apply a coat of Polyurethane. Again, the dry time is really dependent on the brand you use, so closely follow the directions on the can.

Step 4: Assemble. We haven't gotten this far because we are still waiting for everything to dry but I will be updating this section when we start to build it.

Cost of materials for base only:
$100.00