Wood Barn

We’d just decorated the guest bedroom and felt the room needed a bigger and nicer bed. A bedroom, generally has one central ‘hero’ piece of furniture in it and we felt our current one didn’t cut it.

Not being a bed expert I looked everywhere for inspiration. It’s a big room so I considered four-posters, the type with wide sides, something to dominate the room. Through the process I liked the idea of an oversized headboard with the wood being the hero. Obviously I wanted it to look chunky, rustic and textured rather than smooth and ornate or modern and chic.

As usual and what has become a common theme with my woodworking, I couldn’t find what my brain had created in my head. (There’s a theme developing here!) I’d never thought or considered building a large king size bed myself but now I’d made doors, surely a bed wouldn’t be too difficult?

I took a trip to the sawmill to see what they had and perhaps gain some inspiration. To my shock and pleasant surprise, in their furniture showroom they had exactly the type of wood I didn’t know until then I wanted, made up into a bed! Not the design of bed I wanted but the wood was perfect. I inquired and it was in fact reclaimed pine sleepers taken from a site locally. They had tons of it and would machine the sleepers down to the dimensions I required, keeping the rustic face in tact. What a lucky find and perfect for my next creation.

In a few weeks I took delivery of the pine. I’d decided to work with 50mm thick pieces which meant the bed would be seriously chunky. When I saw it, I wondered if it was too much. I’d also ordered the timber for the ‘internal’ aspects of the bed, the frame and slats.

One of the hardest parts of designing the bed was finding the exact correct measurements for a ‘standard’ king size mattress. They’re all slightly different and I had no idea if they maintained their size after some use. In the end I opted to make the frame very slightly over-sized so there was room for some sag in the future.

My son was back from his travels abroad for a while so we had a lot of fun building the bed together. We arranged the thick boards in a random order and biscuit joined them together for the head and foot boards. Due to the height of the headboard we braced the rear to hopefully prevent any movement and twisting. When they were made up we waxed them all over with Fiddes Wax with an antique tint. This was a fun job and really brought out the colour and texture of the wood. It also has the added bonus of smoothing off the surface preventing the boards from snagging bed linen.

We made feet from huge square sawn timber so that the bed would sit very low to the ground. The reason for the large feet were they could double up as an internal anchor for the angles of the sides. We used huge coach bolts to securely fix everything together that annoyingly we could only buy in a chrome finish. We sprayed them black with metal spray paint.

We used my new DeWalt cordless jigsaw to cut out the headboard for power sockets and light switches, anchored the pre-cut slats and we’d created a massive, beautiful, contemporary but rustic bed. Cost: Pine & other lumbar, coach bolts, Fiddes Wax – Total £600

NB: The photos shows the bed with a small mattress that’s been replaced with a king sized which fits much more snugly in the frame!