Making a FLOATING BED

today we're going to make a floating bed no magnets or magic here just a little welding and woodworking i have been wanting to do a bed with a live edge solid wood headboard for quite some time so i ordered this white cedar slab from woodslabs.com it's a really great website and you can pick out the exact slab that you're going to get they do an excellent job of protecting the slabs during the shipping so i unwrapped it just to check the thickness since that will play into the design the frame for the bed is going to be made out of one inch square tube steel i measured out some lengths and then cut them with my angle grinder one of the things that i like about working with steel is that you don't need a lot of tools to do it in fact most of my projects that involve steel i get done just using angle grinders and my welder i put a flap disk on my grinder just to remove any rust or dirt near the ends that i'm going to be welding i laid out all the pieces and you'll see that the two long pieces in the middle extend past the edge of the frame about two and a half to three inches and that's to accommodate the thickness of the slab now recently from my welding projects i've been using these mag switch corner clamps they're fantastic they let you hold your pieces of steel at perfect right angles and then you can switch the magnets on or off to really hold the pieces tightly together so all i have to do is lock the pieces in place with the magnets and then weld the square tube with my forney welder none of the techniques used are particularly difficult in fact you can do this all with kind of a intermediary level of woodworking and metal working skills now the welding process itself can cause the metal to distort a little bit so i use one of my maker brand t-bar clamps to bring the ends together to get a nice fit now there's going to be some vertical pieces of square tube that are hidden behind the slab and that go down to the wall so i ground the welds out in this location nice and flat and then cut notches out of these vertical lengths i then used magnets to hold them at a right angle to the frame of the bed and welded them on now my cuts were a little bit sloppy so i just added a little piece of scrap steel into the extra space and then welded over everything i'm going to secure the bed to the wall and to do this i cut a piece of three inch by quarter inch thick flat bar i drilled holes through the flat bars so that i can run screws through the steel through the drywall and into the studs behind it now i don't know exactly how it's going to line up with this stud so i just drilled a bunch of holes still have a lot of options for attaching it securely to the wall i clamped a flat bar onto the vertical square tubes and welded it in place now even though the flat bar is strong it has a little bit of flex into it so i just clamped a piece of wood behind it so that when i welded it to the square tube it wouldn't buckle or warp too much now in addition to the two legs that are behind the headboard there will be a single center leg that i'm going to make out of thick plexiglass and to attach the plexiglass i cut a couple pieces of two inch angle steel and i welded one of those pieces to the center of the bed frame i then drilled some holes through it that'll allow me to attach the plexi glass even though most of the bed frame isn't going to show i still thought it'd be nice to close up the open ends of the tube steel so i just cut some small square pieces of plate and then used magnets to hold them in place while i welded them to the frame i then ground down this mess and saw there are still a few little bumpy areas but no worries i'll just cover that later with bondo now i wasn't sure how much steel i would need to add to make the frame strong enough so i decided to do a test fit i used my ryobi stud finder to find the locations of the stud behind the drywall and then used a piece of plywood as a temporary leg in place of the acrylic i screwed the frame to the wall and now i was able to see how much it would flex when it had some weight on it it was strong enough to hold but it had a little bit too much flex in it so i just added in a few more pieces of tube steel to the frame now originally i thought about using plywood in between the tube steel but i've been having a lot of fun lately working with expanded steel mesh and i thought that that would also add some additional strength to the steel frame so just drag the piece over then use my angle grinder to cut it i used some scrap bar to clamp the mesh down and then started welding it to the frame now welding produces a lot of heat and i made the mistake of just working my way from one end to the other what i should have done is kind of skip around a little bit so individual places can cool down and that would reduce my risk of having the steel frame itself warp a little bit now doing it this way wasn't too bad it did warp just a tiny bit i would say about a quarter of an inch over the full length of the bed this kind of welding can be a little bit tedious but i just put a little music on and cranked it out now i want to use this mesh because it would provide additional structure to the top of the frame so i didn't just weld around the perimeter i also welded the mesh to the interior crossbars of the frame i used the angle grinder to brush out the welds and get them nice and shiny and then switch back to a flap disc just to round over and smooth out any rough parts i cut a scrap piece of 1 8 inch thick plate steel to make a mounting plate that will allow me to attach the slab to the frame and i just welded this on to the tube steel after drilling some holes through it all right done with the welding and time to get ready for paint but first a little bit of rusty metal primer from rust-oleum this is my go-to primer and i've had great results i've probably used it on over 20 projects by now after the primer had dried i just went in with some bondo and just filled in any gaps or messy parts that i didn't really get done that cleanly with the welder i then painted the frame with two coats of rust-oleum protective enamel and gloss white i ordered some one and a quarter inch thick acrylic from eplastics.com and i just cut this with a fine toothed blade on my table saw i sanded the edges with my orbital sander starting with 150 grit then 220 grit before finishing with 320 grit i used the holes in the temporary plywood leg as guides and drilled through the acrylic i want to get the cut edges of the acrylic nice and clear so i used a three part polishing compound also from eplastics starting with number three which is the roughest grit for this step i just used a cotton wheel on my drill this worked really well and while it wasn't perfectly clear it was actually clear enough for my purposes but i thought let's take it all the way and use the other two types of compound i peeled off the paper which is always really satisfying and tried out this buffer from ryobi it's a little bit different from an orbital sander it has a really soft foam pad and then you have these like little booties that stretch right over it i then applied the compound number two buffed all the edges and then finished with compound number one now a lot of people on instagram suggested that i just use a torture heat gun to heat finish the edges and get them clear so i decided to try this on a couple scrap pieces my hope was that this method would allow me to skip the sanding but it really didn't work that well now i do understand that if you do sand this also to 320 and then use heat it does work pretty good but at that point if you've already done the sanding in my opinion i think the buffing is just a little bit easier i flipped the bed frame upside down and was ready to install the acrylic i had to grind away a little bit at one of the edges just so it would fit around the welds that were holding the angle steel on now i don't want a acrylic to steel rough connection so i just squirted in a little bit of clear ge sealant just to give me a little bit of a sticky rubbery cushion and then use machine screws and nuts to hold the acrylic in place we brought the bread frame into the studio and screwed it to the wall we immediately noticed how the additions of the steel mesh and extra pieces of square tube made the whole thing a lot stiffer the cedar slab is going to need a couple of notches that go around those two pieces of square tube that extend past the bed frame but before i get to those i just want to trim one of the ends of the slab there's a little bit of a kind of a dog-eared corner on it and i just wanted to clean it up a little bit since i had extra length my circular saw didn't make it quite all the way through so i just finished up with a handsaw i cut the notches out using a jigsaw and an extra long blade the nice people over at woodslabs.com did a really good job of finishing this lab it was already pretty smooth from their planer so i just used an angle grinder with a flat disc to kind of round over some of the edges and clean up some of the cut marks on that one little dog-eared corner i then use my orbital sander to sand the whole slab to grit white cedar is a type of soft wood so this went pretty fast to finish the slab i'm going to use simple finish by maker brand when i'm using lighter color wood like this and i really want to bring out the warm wood tones i always use simple finish it's also really nice in an application like this that's going to be right near your face when you're sleeping and breathing simple finish is plant-based provides a durable oil and wax finish and is really easy to apply you just slop on a really thick coat using a rag and or a brush let that first coat sit for about 10 to 15 minutes and then you go back in with a rag again and you just look for any kind of dry spots or uneven spots and you add a little bit more and just kind of move around the oil finish that's sitting on the surface you then wait another 10 to 15 minutes and then use a clean lint-free rag to rub out all the excess i really like simple finish for applications like this because even if this headboard gets nicked up or scratched i can just rub in a little bit more oil and the finish will be perfectly blended and matched now the slab fit into the frame but it was a little bit tight and it was leaning forward just a little too much so i took my palm router and routed some oh i don't know about 3 8 inch deep grooves in the back that will give me just a little bit more wiggle room so i can set the angle perfectly straight we dropped the slab back in and then i drove screws through the steel plate and into the wood this project is sponsored by tuft needle i've been doing a whole series on diy beds for them and they've been absolutely awesome to work with not only that they make the most comfortable mattresses i've ever slept on the mattresses come very efficiently packed up into a moderately sized box i've never had any trouble unboxing them even when i'm by myself and not only are there mattresses the best that i have tried they also make really nice bedding i have been using their linen bedding in all of my recent diy bed projects i'm a really big fan of linen bedding i just think aesthetically it looks so good it has just enough texture but still feels really cool to the touch and it's just the perfect blend of modern and natural all of the bedding is from tuft and needle the linen sheets the pillow cases the pillows themselves the duvet and the duvet cover now this is just a full-size mattress and if i was to do this project again i'd probably do it for a queen size bed just because the duvet that we used was for a queen bed so we had to get creative with how we would sort of fold it up so you could really still get a sense that the bed was floating this bed is sort of a prototype we're working on some design projects for a new hotel and before we build a whole bunch of beds we kind of wanted to test one out and see how it would look and perform so my sister jesse came up with this way of folding the duvet at the foot of the bed and it looks pretty good and really does showcase the floatiness i was really happy to see that the bed frame doesn't wobble or flex when somebody gets in or out of the bed unless you're really low to the ground you don't even see the acrylic at all in fact for future versions i might not even use the acrylic i think just a couple of steel legs in the center will do the trick and and give that illusion in a satisfactory way now jesse doesn't weigh that much so i tested out the bed by jumping on it and the whole thing stayed nice and firm and solid this was a really fun project i've been talking about it for some time on my podcast the modern maker podcast so be sure to subscribe to that if you want to hear more thinking behind these designs but what i liked about it so much was that the aesthetic is very minimalistic because all you really see is white bedding and a wood slab now the acrylic and the floatiness is a little bit on the gimmicky side and it certainly makes the build a little bit more complicated so what i really enjoyed was this kind of tension between the minimalist part and a more complicated building challenge now be sure to check out our other bed projects that we also did for tuft and needle i'll put links to them in the description box below thanks for watching and be sure to subscribe to this channel if you haven't already i know some of these recent projects have been a little bit more complicated than usual but we'll be getting back to some basic diys really soon all right thanks everybody bye you

Channel: HomeMadeModern

Views: 4,720,083

Keywords: DIY, do it yourself, diy furniture, ben uyeda, Modern furniture, how to make furniture, modern design, modern builds, homemade, modern, live edge, wood slab headboard, live edge headboard, diy bed, modern bed, diy modern bed, floating bed, diy floating bed, floating, minimalist bed, tuft and needle, a bed that floats

Id: 5wEFFWjo8ro

Length: 14min 6sec (846 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 07 2020