This is my first "real" woodworking project. I made this for my girlfriendls three year old daughter. It's made out of poplar and has been stained (per the boss's orders) using General Finishe’s "Candlelight". This was intended to be a scaled down sleigh bed.
This project was full of problems from start to finish. Due to the delay of my state tax refund, I couldn't get started as early as I had hoped as I didn't have the money for the tools I needed for the project. This was supposed to be delivered on my girlfriend's daughters third birthday but I missed that by a month and a day exactly.
The second big problem I had was with the hardware I chose for the bed. I bought a bed rail kit from Woodworkers supply and some matching brass screws from Lowes. That turned out to be the biggest pain/heartache of all. When I was trying to mount the hardware, I had three screws break on me. They all broke about an 1/8th of an inch underneath the surface of the wood so trying to get them out was very time consuming. I don't know what was dumber, buying screws from Lowes or continuing to use the screws after the first screw broke.
The third big problem was staining the bed. This was the first time I've ever built or stained anything so the "lessons learned" just kept rolling. The stain came out really blotchy in places. I figured out that it was a result of letting the stain sit on the wood too long before trying to wipe of the excess. Since this was going to be a bear trying to sand it all after it was glued together, I sanded everything before attempting to glue it up. This turned out to be a good and bad idea. After the glue had dried I went back and scraped off any excess glue in the joints. The problem was that after the glue was scraped off I didn't re-sand these areas good enough. At almost all of the joints you can see a dark stripe where I should have sanded more thoroughly..
The fourth problem is really more of a design flaw. My girlfriend really wanted to put a rail on the bed to keep the kid from falling out at night. I didn’t take as much time planning for this and the rail came out a little bulky. It didn’t quite flow with the rest of the bed. I also should have made the rail removable.
Overall I’m pretty happy with the bed. My girlfriend and I worked on this together, which was actually quite fun. Being my first real project and only having a picture of a similar bed to go off of, I think it turned out alright.
Thanks for looking!
Scott
07-11-2009, 03:38 PM
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