When we lived in Virginia, Crazy Jane had a very small bedroom. It wasn't so bad as long as she had the room all to herself, but when she started rooming with the Screamapilar, she had no room to play. At the same time, she had a desk that was designed for a toddler, and she was a tall 10-year-old. So we wanted her to have a loft bed with a desk underneath. We could buy one for her, or I could use the occasion as an excuse to get a miter saw, which I did.
For Christmas 2012, my parents bought a miter saw for me. I found a loft bed and desk design here, but I wasn't sold on the desk plan. Twelve inches deep didn't seem all that big. (That's not what she said.) So we bought the lumber for the bed, but held off on the desk.
Here's the thing about building your own furniture: it's the most expensive way to get furniture there is. There's no way I can compete with Chinese slave labor and particle board. The lumber alone for just the bed was more than double what I'd pay for a complete bed-and-desk combination at Ikea or Walmart. And my craftsmanship isn't making up for any perceived quality issues, either. When I bought a Walmart bunk bed for our kids in 2010 I was not worried when they first climbed the ladder, but when Crazy Jane first ascended her loft bed, I was fairly confident it would fail.
Spoiler alert: it didn't. (Yet.)
Crazy Jane and I built the bed together (that way I could blame her for quality problems.) We worked on the bed on our back patio on Saturdays during the soccer season. I was coaching Articulate Joe's team, so I'd get to release some tension by pretending the boards I was cutting were the necks of the idiot parents who wanted their sons to play all four quarters and be the focus of the attack.
And now, a photo montage. If this were a movie, it would be set to "Everybody's Workin' for the Weekend" or "She Works Hard for the Money."
Along the way, we got a free desk from someone in our ward, so that reduced the urgency on the desk part, and spending two months of Saturdays building the bed reduced the motivation on the desk part. And right about the time we finished painting the bed, we found out we'd be moving, so we didn't really want to start a new project then.
The ladder was the worst part of it. A combination of rounding the results of trigonometric equations and the imprecision of the miter saw and the hardwood floor of Crazy Jane's room left us with a 1/16-inch gap under the ladder when it was attached to the bed. For a while it had old washcloths under it, but now it has small shims.
When we got to Ohio, we switched out the desk underneath the bed for one my grandfather built in junior high school shop class. Show off.
NB: The "math" label is now the "home construction projects" label, too.
via oneofthebest
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