In his new home, Kyle has a bedroom that will support a California King bed, with a mattress that is 72 inches wide and 84 inches long. We designed a custom “floating” platform 80 inches wide and almost eight feet long. The headboard alone is 27 inches tall and 74 inches wide. Our material choice was 2 inch thick white ash, stained with MinWax Dark Walnut and HVLP spray-finished with MinWax Water Based Oil Modified Polyurethane.
Due to the overall scale of this project and the mass of the materials used (the headboard alone weighed about 75 pounds), the relatively simple joinery employed was fairly challenging. Definitely a two-person job, with additional finishing help from Linda!
LL Johnson Lumber in Charlotte, Michigan did a great job milling some beautiful 10/4 white ash to the 2 inch finished thickness for us. Special thanks to Kyle’s cousin, Lucas, who welded up the custom-designed brackets that help support the massive headboard and mount the two stretchers that support the mid-spans of bed slats. The platform is topped with a very cool Leesa hybrid mattress.
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- Chopping 4/4 ash for slats
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- Easing slat edges with a palm router
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- A beautiful load of 10/4 white ash, milled to 2 inches thick by LL Johnson Lumber
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- Cross-cutting with a track saw
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- Waiting for a hand to joint a board for the headboard glue up
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- Headboard glue up with only two wide boards
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- Headboard “cooking” in parallel clamps
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- Raw stock for custom brackets from Alro Steel
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- FastenMaster HeadLok screws of various lengths
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- Stiles ready for routing slat ledges
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- Routing big rabbets with an edge guide
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- Hardware from McMaster-Carr for jig construction
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- Custom router jig and two drill jigs
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- Routing mortises in the ends of the 12 inch wide rails … vertically
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- Mortise routing jig closeup
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- Rail and stile mortises will accept floating tenons
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- Deep hole drilling with one of the drill jigs
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- Floating tenon blanks
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- Floating tenon dry fit
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- Welded up brackets
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- More welded up brackets
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- Routing relief for headboard brackets with a second router jig
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- Headboard bracket dry fit
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- Headboard bracket dry fit
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- Headboard dry fit to head rail
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- Installation of bed slat spacers
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- Transferring holes in one of the two foot assemblies
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- Leveling the headboard glue up with one of Grandpa Bill’s hand planes
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- Headboard hand planing detail
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- First dry fit of foot assemblies on main frame
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- All major components complete and ready for finishing
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- Priming the custom brackets
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- Custom brackets primed and ready for black satin finish
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- Setup for applying black satin Rustoleum with a rattle can
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- Staining with MinWax Dark Walnut
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- MinWax Dark Walnut stain
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- Flooding the headboard with stain
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- Stained headboard ready for clear coating
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- HVLP spray-finishing materials
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- 10 x 10 spray booth set up in the workshop
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- Applying MinWax Water Based Oil Modified Polyurethane with an HVLP spray system
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- Finished components being packed up for delivery
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- The long-anticipated delivery and assembly day finally arrived
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- Setting up to assembly foot subassemblies … with kitty help!
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- Driving 10 inch long HeadLok fasteners to join stile to end rail
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- Flipping the main platform assembly right side up
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- Installing brackets for headboard installation
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- Carefully moving the “sturdy” assembly into place
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- Stretchers dropped beautifully into their custom brackets
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- Completed assembly with natural finish slats in place
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- California King sized Leesa hybrid mattress in its as-shipped state
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- Watching the Leesa mattress come into its final shape was kinda magical
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- Another joint project in the books, with lots of good memories and great nights of sleep to come!
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- Completed platform bed,
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- Completed platform bed,
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- Completed platform bed,