Ryan, here’s the new thread I promised. These beds were done years ago, so I’ll be mixing photos from my son and daughter’s beds to show the basic process.
For the most part it’s pretty simple. Start with the mattress size and add a couple of extra inches on each dimension for bedding (sheet, blanket, comforter, etc) allowance. To that new length add the depth of the bookcases at the head and foot of the bed. To the new width add the thickness of the back wall and the thickness of the front wall, and those are your in-a-nutshell platform dimensions.
These were both done with full-sized mattresses.
If memory serves, the mattress platform heights for both beds are right around 29-30″. I went through several ideas for step-ups for the kids to get up and into these beds, only to discover my kids having a heckuva lot of fun climbing up and jumping down on the platform carcasses after I first set them in place. No step-ups required.
My daughter’s bed platform has six drawers in 28″ slides, the drawers are flanked on each side by a deep cabinet. Because her bed is surrounded by walls on three sides, the space behind the drawers is unused and inaccessible.
My son’s bed platform is slightly different. His bed is built into a corner of his room. His platform is six drawers on 28″ slides, but no cabinets. With the foot of his bed being accessible, the space behind the drawers is accessible from outside the wall at the foot of his bed. It’s a deep “cave”, maybe 24″ wide, 28″ tall, and runs the full length of the bed. He uses that for seasonal storage.
I have each room’s air conditioning return tucked away inside the space of each bed. That was my way of trying to encourage a little air movement through the bed itself to prevent stuffiness.
Onward with photos…
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ABOVE: The front of my son's platform. Six large drawers on 28" slides, no cabinets on the sides.
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ABOVE: Show the oblique, you can see the "cave" behind his drawers that will be used for storage.
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ABOVE: Six backless book cases, three at the head and three at the foot of the bed. the duplex outlet at the head of the bed will be relocated into one of the side shelving units.
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ABOVE: Bookcases with the backs on. Carcasses are 3/4" birch ply, backs are 1/2" MDF with a "V" ploughed every few inches to mimic beadboard. The bottom shelf of the bookcase is set that high above the platform to allow for the thickness of the mattress and the height of the bottom rail of the bookcases' face frame. At the foot of the bed (closest to you in the photo), the bottom openings of the three bookcases will be open to the outside of the bedroom, to serve as three storage cubbies/bookshelves.
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ABOVE: The ceiling of my son's bed. Just a sheet of 1/4" luan ply bent to form a slight barrel arch.
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ABOVE: The "show" side of the luan. the colors in my son's room are sort of pumpkin and black, I used some "antique maple" stain to give the luan a slight orang tinge.
ABOVE:
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ABOVE: Some layout lines for the front wall of my son's bed.
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ABOVE: His built-in desk and over-desk shelves. The door is to his closet, that'll be replaced with a curtain. The bed it to the left.
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ABOVE: The inside of his almost-finished bed. This was before the shelving was added. The pumkpin and black is cork.
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ABOVE: Almost-finished desk area. Kneehole has since been painted black, closet curtain put up, switch plates painted, etc.
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ABOVE: The foot of the bed. More halloween cork! The white on the walls on the right is primer, it has since been painted the pumpkin color.
I hate to throw a groveling disclaimer in, but the room looks so much better in person than through these photos. I think the dark heavy colors throw the white balance of the camera off a bit. It looks pretty sharp in person.
Now for the details on the removable front on my daughters bed that you asked about:
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ABOVE: Bed with the front in place.
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ABOVE: Bed with the front removed.
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ABOVE: See the four holes in the top of the bed's opening? They receive the four dowels...
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ABOVE: ...that are set into the top of the removable panel.
To install the panel, the top if the panel is tilted into place and the four dowels are inserted into the four holes. Then the bottom of the panel is swung into place.
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ABOVE: The platform has two of these on each side of the opening.
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ABOVE: The removable panel has two of these on each side of the opening.
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ABOVE: Once the panel is set in place, the four latches (two on each side of the mousehole opening) are latched. Rock solid.
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ABOVE: Ceiling inside my daughter's mousehole bed.
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ABOVE: The inside of the front wall of the mousehole bed. The shelf is made from the waste pieces from cutting the ribs for the arched ceiling.
Done!
Pretty cool stuff!
You are obviously very imanginative as well as creative.
"When the spirits are low, when the day appears dark, when work becomes monotonous, when hope hardly seems worth having, just mount a bicycle and go out for a spin down the road, without thought on anything but the ride you are taking." — Sherlock Holmes, 1896
Thanks guys!I consider my daughter's room to be a somewhat timeless design. It'll always look great.My son's room? The cork and colors does indeed put it a bit "out there" design-wise, and I knew that going in. We did some serious head-scratching regarding the cork, because once it's there, it's there.But it's his room. His personal space.
very cool! thanks for sharing.
Really nice work!
Mongo, very impressive to say the least. I really appreciate your sharing the photos. I'm looking forward to building something like that for my son one day.As an aside, I had a Rage Against the Machine poster in my room in the early/mid nineties. Brings back fond memories of my teenage years.... It's funny to see a poster like that in a young person's room some 15 or so years later. But back to the original topic, that is some really nice work!
Very nice work.
Thanx for sharing.Chuck Slive, work, build, ...better with wood
Your a good Dad. Any adoptions in your future?
I'm hoping someone will adopt me!
I've always wanted a son that can fly the world and send me good beer!
Jeff Buck Construction
Artistry In Carpentry
Pittsburgh Pa
Unfortunately I'm off to Athens instead of Brussels.Dang.Daddy, do you need some olive oil?
actually we are outta the good olive oil ... down to the bottle of the cheap stuff.
Jeff Buck Construction
Artistry In Carpentry
Pittsburgh Pa
Oops. Came home empty handed this time.
that's it ....
yer no son of mine!
pack your bags boy ...
Jeff Buck Construction
Artistry In Carpentry
Pittsburgh Pa
"...that's it ....
yer no son of mine!
Consider yourself lucky!
well ... I am too young to be a grandfather.
Jeff Buck Construction
Artistry In Carpentry
Pittsburgh Pa
Asisde from the colors of your son's room (personal preference), I love the craftmanship and design of both.
Can your daughter's panel be put in place if she is occupying the bed...seems like a great getaway to hide, study or just veg out
Your children have enough storage to hold (and hide!) all their stuff.
Great project!
My son's favorite color when he was young was orange.When we were designing his bed, he started swaying back to more "neutral" boy colors, blue for the trim and a steel battleship-type gray color for the walls.I got a cork sample pack for another project, and included was a sheet of the pumpkin cork. I showed that to him as a sort of joke, and he asked "can we use it?".And so it goes. It is an eyeful. But as I wrote, it's easier on the eye in person than it is in the photos. Now that he's older, it's his "chill" room. Very much a teenage wasteland of sorts!My daughters bed, the removable panel is always in place. The only time it gets pulled is when we flip the mattress. Once upon a time I thought that when she was older she might want a more open front, and all I'd do is pull the mousehole opening and craft a replacement trim piece to insert in its place. Never happened. The mousehole lives.
That's awesome and I love the Halloween Colors...orange cork who da thunk it?
Daniel Neumansky
Restoring our second Victorian home this time in Alamdea CA. Check out the blog http://www.chezneumansky.blogspot.com/
Oakland CA
Crazy Homeowner-Victorian Restorer
I liked it, too, so i found it last night:http://www.amcork.com/wall-tile-details.asp?id=38
I used another version, the "cherry", in our home office. The corks, especialy the more colorful ones, are definitely a design statement. Where my son's room has it from baseboard-to-crown, the office only has it from the top of the wainscot to the crown. So a little less of it, not as much of an "in your face" look. But I love the look in both rooms.All of their two-tone corks, like the pumpkin and cherry, have a standard 1/4" thick generic granule roll cork backing. That backing is painted black for the pumpkin or red for the cherry.They then apply a thin veneer of "nice cork" that only partially covers the backing, allowing some of the backing color to come through.The product looks great and we've had zero problems with it. But there were some slight size variations from lot to lot. The pumpkin was all excellent, from the first tile through the last. The cherry was off a bit from one batch to the next. And sort of like shingling a roof, you want to mix boxes to minimize any pattern repetitiveness in any one part of the room.After realizing the differing sizes would drive me bonkers, I brought all the cherry cork to my shop, stacked the sheets in batches of 8 sheets (2" thick stack), then squared them up on my table saw by just shaving the edges to make them uniform. Went real fast and the edges cut cleanly. Amcork, very nice people to work with. I've ordered from them several times. Their "strap pack" sampler is well worth it. Some corks look different online versus when holding it in your hand.And now the entire wall is a cork board!
I didn't realize the cork was two layers. I looked at the pix a long time, but concluded they must fill and sand, like epoxy in travertine. Do you need to vacuum the cork to remove the dust from the crannies? Mixing boxes...funny, i was looking at some of the sample rooms and could tell where a box ended and another began and thought exactly that, that some [good] roofers should have laid it. <G>Your info on the precision of the cuts is interesting bec a friend of mine put down a cork floor in her bathroom and ended up not entirely thrilled with the seams, but it was more a problem that it wasn't all the same THICKness. She tried sanding the proud tiles of adjacent ones to match, which messed up the reflectance of the sanded tile.Have you ever laid the engineered cork flooring (snap-together kind) to know if it's dimensionally exact?
The house I built last summer we did the cork in the exercise room and it came out great.
The homeowner sealed it with a clear finish.
The sealing filled in the seams nicely.
It also seamed to lay flat.
ANDYSZ2WHY DO I HAVE TO EXPLAIN TO FRIENDS AND FAMILY THAT BEING A SOLE PROPRIETOR IS A REAL JOB?
REMODELER/PUNCHOUT SPECIALIST
<<It also seamed to lay flat.>>;^)I wish i could recall the manufacturer of these lumpy ones. She very into the "organic" thing, so i'm sure they weren't the cheapest available.
No dust issues, and that was a conversational point raised on my end as well. The veneer is very thin, about the thickness of a business card, so there's not really much of an edge for things to settle upon.Never done a snap together floor. I've done glue-down cork tiles though, and they turned out beautifully. Came close to a cork floor in my own house but we never pulled that trigger.
Card thickness...oh, THAT thin!In the stuff Ian had shipped to the US, i found a bunch of stencils for the cork floors he laid in Oz. He thought them rather pedestrian <groan> after the parquetry and also bec it was not an unusual floor there, so he dressed the cork floors up with paints/dyes. At one juncture i'd talked about cork in the baths here, so i guess he figured to be ready for me...or else he was planning to start up a business once he got his green card! Did you ever post any pics of your corked walls? If it's not too much trouble.........
Just got home. I'll try to snap a few tomorrow.
I'm looking forward to it.
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ABOVE: Here's a closeup of one section. This is one of those "95%" rooms...still 5% to go to completion. One of the things I'd like to do is give the cork a very light coating of paste wax to even out the sheen from one sheet to the next. It looks even to the naked eye, but the camera's flash accentuates variations in the wall.
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ABOVE: In the corners I originally thought I might use a corner board of sorts. No need, I just butted the edge of one sheet to the face of the other.
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ABOVE: With the wainscot, the larger windows, and the bookcases, there's not as much cork in this room per wall as there is in my son's room. I think I had a little under 200 sqft of cork in this room.
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ABOVE: They had the 1/8" thick cork on clearance, as they are transitioning to the 1/4" thick sheets. Good deal for me, they had just enough 1/8" for me to use it in the backs of the bookcases. Less than $1 per sqft for the 1/8" versus the $2.10 per sqft for the 1/4" sheets. The center unit is about 12" deep with fixed shelves, the flanking units 16" deep with adjustable shelves. I'd like to put glass doors on the flanking units...some day. Overall this bookcase wall is 10' tall and about 14' wide.
I still have to paint the ceiling in this room. I was contemplating using cork on the ceiling, but was overridden my my wife.
I told you once a long time ago...thread on wainscoting, i believe...that i reveled in your fearlessness about using color. That's some stunning design work for which i thank you from the bottom of my visual cortex.The variations in your cork aren't of a kind that would bother me. I noticed in the pic in the advertisement that i referenced that there was a row/clump of obviously different tiles. However, if they're distributed, they doesn't reach out and say "check your dye lots!"; it just looks within the range of natural variation. I agree with your wife that a whole ceiling of it might have been the fourth scoop of ice cream on the banana split. Maybe coffered...with a field of plain cork...Your color choices make me smile: i have the maroon/cherry in my LR and the pumpkin in the solarium off of it. I was going to use a dark teal on my wainscoting, but your very dark grey paired with those colors has me rethinking...monochrome might be a nice foil for the color. I also smiled at your "adjustable" shelves.Again, thanks very much for making the effort. My day is off to a great start on that account.
Funny you mention, because the ceiling will be coffered!
I only had a few days to take the office from bare drywall to the finished look, so I was busy busy for about 18 hours a day during that time. I had to cut out what I could where I could, and the coffered ceiling ended up on the cutting room floor.
I'm going to take a couple hours a day next week to finish the little details in the office so I can get that place cleaned up, and I have the coffered ceiling penciled in for completion in July.
I love color. Deep earthy rich pigmented colors. I seem to have settled on using one heavy color paired with something a little more neutral in most of the rooms. In these two rooms the cork is "the color", and to me it seemed right to use a neutral dark charcoal on the trim to accentuate and not conflict with the cork.
One room I've struggled with is our foyer, I think I've tried four different colors on the walls...we just can't get one to translate well into what we both want. I bought color #5 a couple of weeks ago but haven't had the chance to try it out yet. But I do think that #5 will be the one.
Our master bath is the exception, it's sort of a neutral-on-neutral color scheme, but I have teak countertops in there and I wanted things to stay in that sort of beige-tan color family. Here's the master bath below, beige, but I like the look:
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And the "adjustable shelves" in the bookcases...your comment made me chuckle. We wanted a little flexibility in shelf location, so the shelves are indeed adjustable, they're on shelf pins. But I only drilled one sleeve/pin location for each shelf! I'm a realist!
If you like the cork in the photos, you'd love it in person.
Thanks for the kind words!
Do you spray your trim in place? I'm pretty good with a brush, but the only time i've had my painted trim look that good was sprayed.Your counters and floor remind of a chest in one of those FWW design books, on the cover, mahogany (could have been teak) framework and wenge panels. Not only did the light/dark switch of frame and panels make it strikingly "negative", but it was the first time i'd noticed how those two subtle colors just oozed class. I started pairing various browns and wenge a lot more frequently after that, to good effect in sales, though raising wenge panels is an exercise in frustration, to be sure.
I have a light gray Kohler suite in my bathroom, so i'm going to be experimenting with adding powdered graphite to paint to see if i can play with reflectance instead of obvious color. I put that Indian "peacock" slate as wainscoting, counter, and tub deck/surround, so the bath contains about all the color and texture that a hundred square feet can handle. I have no idea why i think it will work, but if it does, i'll report!Have you ever done marbling, the technique for making endpapers in books? I'd think it would be right up your alley and the possibilities are limitless, plus it hasn't been done to death.
I'm a roller and brush guy when it comes to painting. When I have large cabinets or a run of wainscot to paint, I usually use the 4" mini rollers to apply and follow up with back brushing.No, no marbling. Artistically I'm pretty limited and not at all confident.I'd love to see photos of your slate. I'm not a big fan of what I refer to as "slick" materials, like polished granite. I love natural cleft or honed slate, soapstone, things that are a little more subdued than polished glossy stuff.
Marbling is really easy, and a mystery why more people don't use it. I learned in a graphic arts class in an hour; about all you need is a big, flat pan, water, and ink. It's pretty darned hard to go wrong...kinda like trying to make a bad fractal or kaleidoscope pattern. You get to play with all that color PLUS motion...delish. I've been taking photos of my bath as i'm going along and will post a before/after photo thread when i'm done. I was making swell progress until it stopped snowing and all the little chlorophylls caught my attention...
One of the nicest bathrooms I've ever seen, bar none!!!!!!!!!
Thanks!
Mongo, I assume you built the cabinets for that bath? Very nice work. How did you handle the cut outs at the base? Is there a toe kick painted flat black under there? Or is it truly empty under the cabs?
Yup, I built the cabinets. Thanks.I waffled between a non-cutout, non-recessed toe kick (just solid baseboard like the rest of the room), a regular recessed toe kick, and a cutout. My daughter really wanted a cutout, so she drew it out for me. I forget how old she was...8 or 9 or 10 years old? The only restriction I gave her was to make the hole tall enough so the head of the vacuum cleaner could fit through it.I put a false back in the space under the cabinet, about 8" back, and painted it black. To limit how far back dust bunnies can hide.
A false back is the term that I was searching for in my post. I was thinking that would be preferable to it just being totally open for the sole reason that you mentioned, keeping the dust bunnies at bay.That really is a sharp room. Kudos.
Very, very cool. I really like the look of this cherry cork. Reminds me of some Japanese woodblock prints, or maybe what Whistler would have done with his Peacock room if he had used this.You've got a fine eye for design. You study that at all or pick it up on the fly?Thanks for sharing.'Man who say it cannot be done should not interrupt man doing it' ~ Chinese proverb
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No, no studying or formal education. I'm the sort that makes things up as I go along. I start with a very rough drawing (which is restrictive because I can't draw!) then try to do a slightly better scaled drawing to pull some measurements.Nothing fancy though, just notebook paper scratchings. And usually a little pile of eraser dust when I'm finished.Thanks!
And here are a few more of the pumpkin.
Thinking about this, when I ordered the pumpkin, they had all I needed in stock. So I think my pumpkin order was all from the same lot or the same batch.
When I ordered the cherry, they were low and had it on backorder. So I think my cherry order was from more than one lot/batch, which was why it's less uniform in size and appearance.
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ABOVE: Not much to say here.
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ABOVE: The "wall" on the right is the partition that makes up the foot of the bed. Thus the three storage cubbies that fit under the inside-the-bed bookcases at the foot of the bed.
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ABOVE: Close-up #1
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ABOVE: Close-up #2
Overall, I think the seams are much less noticeable in the pumpkin than in the cherry. Still, I like them both quite a bit.