Queen Loft Bed in Five Easy Pieces

●Simplicity

In the interest of full disclosure, I must admit to not counting the 1x6 slats that support the queen size mattress in the count of 5 pieces for this recent commission. Otherwise, we have a one-piece foot board assembly with permanently attached ladder, a headboard assembly tall enough to allow sitting up in bed (for some), two 2x6 rails which drop into the foot and headboards on heavy duty bed rail fasteners and one lengthwise safety rail that also provides rigidity:

Assembly time is super quick, about 15 minutes. Add to that any needed shimming to level the legs and placing a couple of 1/4” lag bolts anywhere through the loft into wall studs. The concept in this design is to put all the assembly labor in the shop rather than at the site, thus no collection of boards, no bags of hardware, no hours of assembly time. If portability is of any concern or one enjoys working in the shop this design accommodates it nicely. Having spent two hours of my life in toto trying to distribute mattress slats evenly on a bed frame I decided to make this simple too by gluing spacers on top of the ledgers:

●Headroom

An unfortunate drawback in most loft designs is requiring adults to crouch when entering the space beneath. In order to allow most women and quite a few men to walk freely under my design I enlisted the help of staff member Derrick in my SketchUp first draft to establish the 5'9” clearance I was seeking:

Given the typical 8' ceiling height this is about the absolute maximum loft headroom after taking into account the mattress thickness and seated height for a child or short person on the mattress. Tall folks would need to read propped on their elbow. Note: the lower and upper clearances in this particular design were perfect for the granddaughter who commissioned it but may not be suitable in other circumstances.

●Safety

I found it disturbingly odd that both the commercial loft units I looked at as well as a DIY set of plans from Home Depot had no railings above the mattress level. This design does provide a 1x4 railing several inches above the mattress on all sides. This not only adds rigidity but prevents the inadvertent active sleeper roll out. The railings in the head and foot boards are fully mortised pine 1x4's, a pair for the headboard end. The 1x1 ledgers are glued, nailed and screwed into the rails. The first step of the ladder is 14 ½” from the floor, but all other steps including the upper cross beam and the safety rail are exactly 12” apart which will not disturb the proprioception of foot positioning without looking. The ladder is permanently attached for further safety.

●Joinery & Dimensions

The 2x6 foot board and headboard rails are attached to the L posts at each butt joint with four 7/16” dowels. Better have a helper when doing this glue-up! I used a standard four-hole Dowl-It jig for this purpose by removing all the bushings, leaving four 7/16” ID holes. Care was taken not to ruin the internal threads of the jig with the 7/16” brad point bit, and they came through just fine. The basic assembly is based on four fully mortised bed rail fasteners, though the Woodcraft set I used was not the best. The countersinks in the steel plate had to be increased to recess hardened 2½” #8 screws. The screw heads must not protrude above the plates. Also, the mortises were deepened about .02” greater than the plate thickness (see photo below) to ensure the fasteners would draw up tightly when dropped into place. I cut the mortises into the rail ends using a tenoning jig on a table saw which made this step quick and easy. Luckily a high shop ceiling allowed this since the 69 1/2" rail stands vertically on the saw.

Overall dimensions are 89” high at the top of the foot board post, 94” high at the top of the headboard post, 80” long and 58” wide. Less the thickness of the 2x6's this yields a well for a queen size mattress that has interior dimension of 77” long and 55” wide. This allows a space of 1"-2" around the mattress to facilitate making the bed. The tapering on the bottoms of the legs is not decorative! Obviously, the foot board and headboard assemblies cannot go through a door frame upright but can be moved about easily on their sides. The taper is just what is needed to allow the taller headboard assembly to move around the corner of two 3' wide hallways which meet at right angles to one another. That about the smallest turning situation you would have in a typical home.

●Reuse and Cat Use

In keeping with a basic principle of Flying Circus Studios all the redwood used in the loft was salvaged from a dismantled deck. The great problem with this reuse was the many layers of deck oil that had hardened after several decades of Flagstaff weathering. This required multiple shallow passes through a planer destroying two sets of planer blades in the process. I made no attempt to fill the blackened screw holes which add an element of curiosity and visual interest. The wood itself was amazingly free of cracking and splitting, though, of course, boards were culled and cut with this aspect in mind. Even the cutoffs were utilized to make in-drawer knife blocks for my Etsy shop.

The cat of the house immediately found this new treehouse of great interest and actually scaled one of the posts vertically to reach the plush mattress above. This left numerous scratches up and down the post (repaired but visible just above nose). Now a series of steps has been arranged to allow said kitty to reach the mattress by jumping instead of clawing. 

Unquestionably this new loft bed is the best seat in the house. Its owner thinks so too. 

 

SketchUp Success for Woodworkers -- Woodworking Tip #22

The 22nd woodworking tip is:  buy this book and use it to learn SketchUp!!

And yes, here I thought I was the only woodworker graduate from Columbia. Turns out I was wrong, for David Heim, one of my fellow alumni, is not only a fine fine woodworker, specifically wood turning, but also one of the country's leading experts on the use of the 3D modeling program SketchUp as applicable to furniture making, cabinetry and all the other lovely objects made from wood. SketchUp is a complete drawing program, useful not just to woodworkers, but to interior designers, architects, landscapers, city planners, etc. What David Heim has done in his excellent book SketchUp Success for Woodworkers recently published by Spring House Press is extracted and tuned the aspects of the program which enable woodworkers to produce attractive, realistic 3D models of their ideas, designs and projects.  (At this point I have finally stopped my word processing program's constant urge to turn SketchUp into ketchup.)

If you stop reading here, my advice to you woodworkers is get David's book and learn SketchUp! While you're at it also visit his online shop at Etsy:  www.etsy.com/shop/DavidHeim  to see some of his beautiful turnings.  You can also buy his book through his Etsy shop.

So how does design happen? Starting to learn SketchUp got me reflecting about the evolution of the design tools I've utilized throughout my woodworking career. Now please don't ask why I still have this, but it all begins here:

Back in the day, while the girls were sewing and muffining in Home EC class, the boys were combating Sputnik by taking Mechanical Drawing. I don't think this was an elective either; it was a manly skill.  The main object of the course was converting some fanciful 3D object, often resembling the parapet of a Medieval castle, into front, top and side views. A lot of your grade depended on placing a dotted line where superman's Xray vision would have detected a change in form on the opposite side.

Years later when I took up professional woodworking, home computers, let alone drawing software, had not yet been invented, and thus dredging up this old junior high school skill proved most useful. At this point we call it "drafting."  I found myself even building drafting tables for myself and customers as well as gathering a nice collection of those green plastic Staedtler templates.  These templates helped me learn such important things as curves are French.  Still the plans did not appear all that different from those in 8^th grade:

Continuing on: thanks to the urging of our son Josh we were one of the first families on the block to own a computer, a handmade XT. Fast forward years later Josh has opened his bicycle trailer and accessory business BikeShopHub and required a CAD-CAM program to operate a ShopBot CNC tool in the manufacture of his novel bicycle travel case the Cello. The Cello amazingly converted a BOB one-wheeled bicycle trailer into a travel luggage box for not only itself but also the bike that pulled it! The chosen program was bobCAD-CAM (ironic, but no relationship to the trailer company), and thus thanks to my son I myself moved to the next stage in design: computer aided drafting using BobCAD-CAM. Without question the greatest benefit of CAD was what I call “dimensional integrity,” no more struggling with finest line on a triangle scale to extract a particular dimension or carefully adding up a series of dimensions to verify sums. Any part of a plan could be measured, and the numbers were precise, perfect, always added up!

So now I have reached the latest stage in the evolution of my design career: starting to learn SketchUp using David Heim's excellent book SketchUp Success for Woodworkers. My first recommendation and his too is to pass over the online program and download SketchUp Make 2017 (still available free as of this posting). Then with program running follow David's clear step-by-step instructions: from choosing a template to setting up your first file to learning the basic tools to creating your first board. He is easy to follow. The centerpiece of the book, his four rules for success, makes enormous sense to anyone who has ever encountered a table saw and attests to his major investment in both mastering and adapting SketchUp for fine woodworkers. What I particularly like about David's approach is that he walks you so very carefully through the SketchUp learning curve. I would not expect to become adept overnight, but you could not have a better guide.

Perhaps only second to the joy of creating, for a custom fine woodworker, is the joy of working directly with your clients, getting to know them and their vision of the environment they desire to inhabit. Yet with few exceptions the difficulty has always been offering a clear picture of what exactly they were commissioning. Shop drawing and blueprints are generally insufficient in this regard. Once I even had to build a piece completely over again because I could not see the “picture in the head.”

I only wish I had had a tool like SketchUp throughout my career. I could have then offered to clients a fully 3-dimensional model, built in the chosen woods and with the right stain color, something they could “walk” around. In the later chapters of his book David explains how you can import any wood grain or texture to your model or even render it realistically. Clients are always finding photographs of some piece or environment they like, and you will even learn how to initiate your design using one of these. Both client and creator benefit. You will be able to push, pull, stretch, shrink, reshape, add components, subtract components until the picture in your own head is achieved.

Afterword: SketchUp and computer assisted manufacturing (CAM)

Though in most cases I did not use the CAM side of bobCAD-CAM, occasionally it came in very handy especially when both precision and duplication were required such as cutting the triangular solid oak countertops that formed this 15-sided customer service center. The screen shot of the bobCAD-CAM file used to cut these on ShopBot is pictured above along with the finished product. SketchUp Success for Woodworkers does not cover using SketchUp files (.skp) to operate CNC machinery, but a quick look on the web indicates that conversion to CNC files is possible. I am no expert on drawing programs, but I do know a good guidebook when I see one. David Heim's book is the first place to go if you want this powerful tool in your tool bag...happy sketching!