For the past year Esther has been after me to build her a new bedroom suite, being 13 the bunk bed set I built years ago just didn’t cut it anymore. Since she likes to change her mind on a regular basis I thought the safest way to do this was to have her design what she wanted, pick the wood and help me build it over the Christmas holidays.



She found a few images on Google and made notes of what she liked. We started this past Wednesday afternoon and have the bed finished. I guess the design is somewhat shaker, not my cup of tea in furniture but she loves it and that is all that matters to me. There are quite a few things I wanted to do (change) such as raised panels and thicker posts for the legs but……I was told that is not what she wanted<G> It sure has been a fun few days!



It amazes me how fast kids pick things up, She cut some of the mortise and tennons, did some of the jointing and pretty much all the planning. The surface sander saved us hours of manual sanding and I would not want to take this project on without the spiral cutter heads in the planer and jointer. We had next to no tear out and the little bit we did have came out with a scraper. She now knows how to use most of the tools in the shop and understands why I have two and three of the same machines….production….



The wood is Curly Yellow Birch (being this figured it is some of the hardest wood I have come across to work with, exotics included) from Cape Breton and the panels are Curly Red Birch from Folly Mountain. The finish is Boiled Linseed oil and three coats of water based lacquer. We decided to leave it in the shop for tonight as it was 10 when we finished tonight (almost midnight yesterday), I was amazed at how fast this went together, only 2 ˝ days. Tomorrow we will clean the shop and start the Armoire which we hope to have finished New Years Day.

Thanks for looking and Happy New Year!

Andy