Building a New Bed

So this was an interesting project that was not originally on our Phase One Plan for the Rome house.

It started when we visited Ilse and the family in Duluth and stayed in their guest room with a luxurious king-sized bed.  Going back home to a queen-sized bed (and our growing collection of pets that shared with us), got us thinking about upgrading our bed size.  We started shopping for a new bed, but it soon became a “we could build it ourselves” idea.

The Plan

As usual, I turned to my trusty Pinterest for advice and soon found a basic bedframe design that both of us liked.  We wanted a California king-sized bed and did not want a separate base mattress. We measured, measured some more and created a drawing of what we were going to build. From the drawing, we created our shopping list and went to Home Depot for supplies.

Building a Bed

We started Project Big Bed Build in our carport.  It was close to Pieter’s growing collection of tools and provided plenty of space to work in.  Pieter started with a basic 2×4 frame.

He then added middle supports (like you would for a wall) and rested the frame on four 4×4 legs. The height of the legs was measured to how high we wanted our bedframe off the ground. Then we added some additional legs to the middle supports. We used 2×10 pieces to finish the sides of the bed, all measured so the mattress would be placed inside these sides. The base that the mattress would rest on would be individual planks, cut to the width of the mattress.

Changing the Plan

The original plan called for a removable plank base but we thought it would just be faster to fix the planks to the base. We cut all the planks to size but thought it would be easier to screw them to the frame once the bedframe was in place. This means we had to finish most of the painting, move the frame inside, and completely put it together in place. If we knew at that point, that the bed had to be moved out of the room again within six months, we would have stuck with the original plan (pretty sure).

We had to get really creative to get this huge frame into our bedroom.  The only door big enough was the sliding door to the small balcony.  In the end, we removed a piece of the stair railing, hoisted the bed up and through the door and reinstalled the railing. 

Once the bed was in place in our bedroom we carried up all the planks and screwed them to the bed frame. Our struggles to get the frame up to the second-floor bedroom scraped off some paint and I did some more touch-ups in place.

Our new mattress was on its way, but the delivery date was still a couple of days out.  Back onto the frame went our queen mattress and that is how we used our new bed for a couple of days.

The old queen mattress fitted down the stairs to the guest bedroom, but the larger king-sized mattress was too big to come up the stairs.  Luckily, the delivery men had instructions to get it all the way into the bedroom, and that is what they did.  After trying several angles, the new mattress also came in through the sliding doors and made it all the way to the bed.

My new sheets and comforter had been ordered weeks before and in no time we were transitioned over to the larger bed. And a good thing too, since we now had two kittens that also wanted to sleep on the bed (and on us).

Here is a look at the finished bed without any people or pets in it:

Up next: time to Update the Living Room!