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. 

 

Self-Isolation Accessory -- Kindle Holder

The mornings pass passably well, but the afternoons can get long.  Time then to pick up a good book without cricking the neck or tiring the arms.  The hand not changing pages can either rest on the base or wrap around the bottom of the upright.  The Kindle is held by light compression, the side supports adjustable tighter or looser.  The angle can be changed and the whole assembly flipped over to position the upright on the left side instead.  A set of holes in the upright allow the Kindle to be raised or lowered.  It can also be moved up or down on its platform to obtain the perfect reading height.  The side supports can also be expanded to fit a tablet.  Without access to the "shop," this was a fairly easy garage project, for a happy wife is the secret to true business success.

Nonmiraculous Spiral Staircase

As an architectural element the spiral staircase always holds intrigue.  Where might it lead?   An alchemist’s lair, an artist’s garret, a lighthouse lens, the captain’s quarters?

My dorm room window during my sophomore year at Columbia College provided me a slantwise view of the front facade of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, a place built for an epic congregation, frequented then by only a few, myself included, and now the resting place of James Gandolfini.  Once in my wanderings I encountered a deacon who asked me “Do you want to see something?”  Not what you think. What followed was an enthralling, rambling tour through the hollow walls of the building honeycombed with passageways, tunnels, bridges, spiral staircases, windows both outwards and inwards, a world of its own that few if any parishioners would even guess at.

So when presented with the problem of connecting the lobby of the Northland Aviation FBO at the Flagstaff airport to the briefing room aka classroom above without taking up valuable space, the spiral staircase solution naturally came to mind.  What ensued was a massive amount of geometry and trigonometry to align all the factors of rise, run, rotation, radii, step overlap, etc., all those numbers eventually converted to huge chiseled mortises deep into an APS (Arizona Public Service) power pole.  The treads were laminated hemlock 2x4's each embedded so tightly that the balusters might not have been necessary, though I would not venture even an approach to the Loretto Chapel’s miraculous staircase.   The 2x2 balusters rose into the room above and supported a circular railing laminated to them piece by piece of 1/8" baltic birch, eventually some 25 layers.

I taught my first ground school classes in that room above.  We could have been in the 40's, discussing aviation on the second floor of our Quonset hut hangar. The circular railing sat right in front of the instructor’s table with the student desks behind.  Latecomers, every teacher’s nemesis, would then be unable to sneak into the back of the classroom, but instead their heads would rise inch by inch through this cylinder for all to see, the instructor’s scimitar mentally poised to swing across the tube, the transgressor’s head sent evenly bouncing down the steps with their perfectly parallel and equal rises.

This spiral staircase paid for much of my commercial pilot’s license, and later one of my ground school students ordered a similar spiral staircase, the ascent to a loft in her own home and a rare instance in my custom woodworking career in which I utilized the knowledge gained from #1 to do a second of something.  The Quonset hangar itself, alas, was a victim to progress, the staircase salvaged.