The Bed

While Stephanie was here, Chloe and Stephanie found a store in the Caserne de Bonne shopping area that had a fabulous kid's bed. It was a bit like a treehouse, with unevenly cuts planks and was raised about three feet above the ground. The designer is a French guy who works in Lyon, and the bed is build by a high end Belgian company. The problem is that they have priced the bed a bit ridiculously: ~3000 us dollars *unassembled* and without a mattress. As an aside, if you ever go furniture shopping in France, be prepared for extreme sticker shock. People must be buying new furniture here, based on the number of furniture shops that seem to stay in business. However, if you look at average salaries, and then see that an entry level couch is in the thousand euro range at most of these stores, things just don't seem to add up. I guess it's just about expectations. Anyway, I loved the design of the treehouse bed so much that I decided that it might be worth building our own, and I could get Zoe involved in the building process too, just like my dad used to do with me. When I was growing up, we built all kinds of things, including a cabin in the mountains, a treehouse, a renovated bedroom, a giant shed and many other projects. It is a very satisfying, if time consuming and exhausting process to go through the planning and execution of DIY building projects, so I'd like Zoe and Alex to have the skills that were taught to me (and maybe some new tricks as well!). I started drawings in Google Sketchup, as I had done with the climbing wall and hot tub, but quickly gave up. With all the non 90 degree angles, it was too much of a test of my non existent CAD skills. Instead, I sketched it out by hand, went to the Leroy Merlin website, and wrote up a parts list. Leroy Merlin is like the Home Despot, but with marginally more knowledgable staff. Additionally, despite a maddeningly illogical organization of their stock, things are a bit easier to find at Leroy Merlin. Despite the overall expertise level being higher, the willingness to be of assistance is visibly lower. The pine boards are of excellent quality and are milled to high precision. The tools, however, are comically overpriced.
In designing the bed, one important point was to make it disassemblable -- something that I had not done before. I settled upon using carriage bolts and Rastex fittings (like IKEA uses). Doorways can be quite narrow in these old houses, so I wanted to make sure that when we move, the bed won't need to be sawed into pieces. I did all the building in the attic, which now has a thick layer of sawdust on the floor. My back is also a mess from being hunched over to avoid getting smacked in the head by beams and dowels. After around eight days of hard work (roughly 3 full days of work, and then after work hours) and three or four more delightful trips to Leroy Merlin, I finished! Then came the disassembly of the old bed, the disassembly of the new bed, the carrying of the new bed pieces downstairs (everything fit through the door -- woooo!) and the reassembly of the bed downstairs. Here are some pictures of the building process and the result
Zoe, showing me how it's done:





Back face of the bed (interior)

Back face of the bed (exterior)

Joint detail

Right wall exterior

Right wall interior

Front face interior

Front face exterior


Left wall exterior

left wall side

Back, left and right connected by Rastex, and carriage bolts

All four walls on


Floorboards carriage boilted on and roof slats attached with furniture screws (removable)


Interior

SURPRISE (I moved it downstairs and had it waiting for Zoe when she got home)!!

Testing it out

The unfinished stairs. Zoe and I went on a short hike with a sawzall to find some branches to make the rungs out of. I then spent a lot of time sanding them down.


I am quite proud of how well the disassembly and assembly worked. With two people it should only take around 20 minutes for each.