I've been thinking to get a bed for my son for a while. It's quite disappointed at the furniture stores; some are even called high end custom made furniture shop, but far away from what I expected.
I started to collecting ideas after I decided to make one myself last year. During that time, whenever I see an fancy object, I would try to image it as a bed. Till one day, I went to my friend's home, his son is 7 years old and was practicing piano. What a great idea, a music bed!
I spent lots of hours in designing the bed, as I have a long commute on the train to my office every day, I have plenty of time on drawing the draft.
I finally got it done last weekend. Let's take a look.
The foot board has musical symbol (Bass Clef) on two sides and waves in between to form the frame. The panel has 5 lines music notations, violin, and trumpet.
The head board has musical symbol (Treble Clef) on two sides and waves in betwwen, the panel contains rooster, clouds, flowers and sun. The rooster stands for my son, if you ever heard chinese zodiac, that tells you which year my son was born.
The Rooster has purple heart crest, cherry body, mahogany tail, hard maple/walnut eyes.
I also put notations as decorations on the frame.
Looks from the side
There are quite bit of safety concerns during the design period, for example, the knob for the drawers. I always worry if he fall off the bed and hit the knob, so I decied to make the curve faceboard for the drawer, and people can put hand in the gap between the rail and the faceboard to open it - no knob required.
The construction is mainly dowel joint and mortise/tenon, the panels are inlay. The biggest concern when I designed the bed is how to distribute the load of mattress, as for a 5-6 years old boy, jumping on the bed is unavoidable, I worried if the head/foot board can be abused like that. The solution is to divert the load to the framing of drawers.
My son really love it.
Thanks all for viewing.
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Originally Posted by Bill ThompsonNM
