Studio711.com – Ben Martens

The bed in our guest room consists of a mattress on a box spring on a very simple metal frame. I decided it was finally time to build something a little nicer and give us more storage in the process.

The design is based very heavily on Steve Ramsey’s platform bed. I decided to redraw it from scratch in Sketchup to get some more experience using the app and also to scale it down from a king size to a queen size bed. Tim built a similar bed recently from a different design so I was able to use (hopefully) some of the things he learned along the way.

This design process went much better than my previous attempts with Sketchup and this time I feel like it was actually a valuable use of my time. I’ve included a couple screenshots of the complete design roughly showing the colors that it will actually be and then a view of the guts of it color coded to help differentiate things a bit. (The second drawing doesn’t include all of the slats that will run across the top to support the mattress.)

The design is based mostly on 1x4s with a few exceptions. This should keep it light (and cheap). Most of it is held together with pocket screws. Almost the entire underside of the bed is used for drawers. Some of them won’t pull out all the way and the ones by the head of the bed will be difficult to access, but why not make them full size?

I’ll paint it white when I’m done so I’m just using simple pine boards from Home Depot. We’ll see how long this takes me to complete. Again, there are a lot of firsts for me on this project which usually equates to me making multiple attempts at some steps.