Platform Bed COMPLETE

Shelf cubbies; Fabric backed, lit, assembled, and awesome. 

 

Final assembly time. some things worked really well; some did not. Jenn and I did a test run of the outer frame, and a few problems showed up immediately.


To start with, the hinges were a great idea, but the ones I bought didn't work at all. as soon as any force was applied to them, they tore away from the wood of the shelves. I'm not sure if it was the screws, or the location on the shelf, or what. I currently have the hinges replaced with traditional L-braces, but I will soon be replacing those with hinges again, as right now the bed is much too large to move around the room much less out of it for any reason.

The rope lighting is great, but running the lights along the bottom of the shelf cubbies limited their ability to illuminate the contents, so I took Jenn's advice and switched it to run along the tops of the cubbies. Since I wanted to avoid drilling new holes, I needed to flip the shelves and reconnect them. This turned out to be a huge undertaking, eating up nearly an entire weekend. If you remember, two of the shelves have a different color on the bottom than the top, and so the dividing shelves in them need to be disassembled and flipped, rather than the whole unit.


Unfortunately doing this to 2 units and not the whole outer frame meant that half of the shelves ran in a clockwise spiral and the other half ran anti-clockwise.  In the end I had to disassemble nearly the entire outer frame into its fundamental components and reassemble it. All to get the rope lighting to run along the top without drilling new holes.

Adding to the mess was the fact that I flat out forgot during most of this that we had purchased a pair of shelf add-ons do put a door on a couple of the cubby holes. this required assembling each add-on, finding a place for them to go, and drilling the appropriate holes.

Jenn came home from work and helped in the final few steps. We finished the outer frame, attached the braces, added the inner frame, laid down the MDF slats, and threw on the new mattress. Its MUCH bigger than the original plan for a platform bed, but its a sweet bed and it has tons of storage. And I built it by hand, so there's that. It fills up the room, but it's totally worth it.

Now there are a few things I'd like to add to it, such as wrapping canvas around the slats under the mattress to make them easier to remove all at once when accessing the storage underneath, and of course adding heavier duty hinges, but this bed is fully functioning and I call this project COMPLETE!