We Three Kings

You may have noticed a flurry of posts by yours truly over the last few days. And the more astute among you may have put together that this flurry has coincided with the end of my semester. Which means that for three glorious weeks I have nothing to do -- well, other than trying to plan my courses for next semester and prove a few theorems and write a book review or two and all of those kinds of things. But I figured that after a long hard first semester in my new job I deserved to take most of this week off from thinking about math and/or teaching. So how did I spend the week? Did I just lie around in my pajamas all week playing video games, catching up with back issues of The New Yorker and watching West Wing reruns on Bravo?

Well, yes. I did all that. But I also built a bed. You may recall that several weeks ago we bought a Sealy Reatta Pillowtop Mattress Set as we were finally ready to graduate from the cheap-o Queen Size bed that I had bought when I started graduate school into a fancy-shmancy KING SIZE BED. (Not that there is anything uncomfortable about the Queen Size bed -- and now we have a real bed for all of you to sleep in when you come visit us!) In any event, the new bed was finally going to be delivered this week. But we had delayed buying a frame to put said bed into, knowing that even the cheap metal frames would cost about the same as the tools needed for me to build one, so I took the opportunity to show off my mad revivalizing skillz and I built us a bedframe.

Now, before you get too impressed, I should say that the bedframe is nowhere near as elaborate as the one that K. wanted, so she is still pouting like Carissa Gaghan. In fact, I based the design on a bed designed by my boss's significant other, and the design looks like this:



As you can tell, it is quite possibly the simplest bed design that one could imagine, consisting only of a bunch of 2x12's, 2x4's, and 4x4's. So off to the Lowes I went to buy the wood, properly cut for me since a saw is not yet a part of our toolshop. First I stained and varnished it (that's Golden Pecan for those of you keeping score at home):






Then yesterday I spent the afternoon carrying the wood up to the bedroom and assembling the pieces into place. I became very close friends with our drill and lots of L-brackets:







And finally, when K. got home, we were able to move the whole thing into place and we had our finished product. A King-sized bed that feels like a cloud.





I'm quite happy with the way the whole project turned out: I like the simplicity of the frame, and I think that the color looks quite nice. And if it isn't apparent from the photos, the 4x4's I used for the legs of lots of cool knots in them. The other moral of the story was that building furniture was both a lot easier and a lot more fun than I had imagined. Next up: I need to build us some bedside tables!