Today, I have completed a 4-month project!! Well, almost.
Sometime before Thanksgiving, the bf and his brother set out to build us a new bed. I found the plans on Ana White (actually they were from Birds and Soap, I found them on Pinterest and the link took me to her guest post on Ana White), and modified it to fit our king mattress. Since his brother lives about 2 hours away, we came home with a truckload of cut wood and a teeny tiny garage to work in. Gradually we picked up the hinges, brackets, and tools we needed to get that bad boy put together, and I started staining.
Interesting sidenote on the stain: For Christmas 2011, we received a beautiful storage chest from the bf's brother. We called him up and talked to him about the stain he used, since we wanted the bed to match it. Turns out, he had several nearly-empty cans of stain in his garage, and since he had built 5 of these chests, he just decided to mix them all together so he'd have enough stain for all of them. I'm ok with this, it turned out beautiful. But he pretty much said good luck matching it. Well, my trip to Home Depot seemed futile, but I was still dead set on stain instead of paint. I settled on Minwax special walnut, since none of the other tones seemed remotely close. We wound up with several pieces of scrap after cutting the necessary pieces, so I stained a small piece of 1x2 and waited. 30 minutes or so later, when I decided that if it wasn't dry I was sick of waiting anyway, I plopped that scrap down on top of the chest, and BAM. Perfect. So thank you Minwax!
The single solitary reason for building a bed was because the cheap rails we had were beyond repair. 4 C-clamps and a vice-grip just couldn't hold it together anymore. I also wanted more storage in the bedroom, particularly because we have lots of "stuff" that really does not have a home, but somehow I feel like it should go in the bedroom somewhere. I'm sure there will be a future post about organizing when I get there... Anyway, neither of us wanted to just put the box springs on the floor, so the storage platform came first.
Well, we've had the platform built for at least 3 months, and a giant mess in the tiny garage. I have project ADD and went in the garage to work on something else, and decided I simply could not work out there. So after 3 hours and 2 trash bags later, I had workspace! The bf was ecstatic that I had cleaned, but not so stoked about me working on everything-but-the-bed. Well, the last piece to be stained is the headboard frame, and it's a little large for me to be working on it myself. The last time I tried to sand it, I decided I didn't want a bunch of sawdust in the garage for some reason, so I managed to get it out into the front yard. Getting it back was a different story, and somehow I broke off one of the 4x4 legs. So I reattached it and decided that I shouldn't mess with it anymore. Today, now that there is free space in the garage, I decided that leaning it over onto my pallets would be easy enough to get it sanded, and well, it's done!
I guess I can't really say I finished the project yet. But I did get a massive roadblock out of my way! The bf is off for Good Friday tomorrow, so maybe we can get the headboard put together and finally attach it all! I'll let you know!
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