A Bedtime Story - Greene and Greene Style

I’ve been thinking about building a Queen sized bed for the spare room for a while. I had some plans I bought quite a while back for an Arts and Crafts style bed but I wasn’t satisfied with the details. After playing around with CAD for a while I managed a decent Tsuba opening similar to what I’ve seen in G&G furniture and more notably in Darrell Peart’s work. From there it wasn’t much of a stretch to re-work the head and foot boards to include the G&G cloud lifts. The easy part was over. Now I had to cut the wood to match the plans.

One of the lessons that all of the woodworking videos stress is making patterns. By the time I finished I had 8 different patterns for the various cloud lift elements and curved legs. From there I proceeded to template router the necessary pieces. A little work with the spindle sander helped smooth the curves.

I still had no good idea how to make the tsuba inlay pieces (walnut by the way). I made a pattern to router the curve to match the tsuba opening with 3/8” overlap. Using a rabbet bit I removed the excess so the piece would fit into the opening on the board. After blowing a couple of pieces up (and nearly giving myself a heat attack) trying to use a pattern and router to finish the inside edge I finally went with thesafe approach and used the spindle sander and sanded my way into the final piece (see pic 5). The walnut inlay was glued and pegged to the headboard and foot boards.

From there it was more router work, rounding the edges, followed by many long hours sanding everything into smooth, soft curves.

Assembly was completed in stages, from the inside out. The finishing G&G plugs and spacers were the last items to complete the Greene and Greene look. I finished it with a couple of coats of Watco Cherry Stain for the cherry parts and some Watco black walnut for the walnut pieces prior to final glue-up. The whole thing was sprayed with 3 coats of polyurethane, sanded with 600 grit between coats, and finished with Behlens duplexer. All in all, it took a couple of months, mostly because I had to figure out how to actually make the details that I thought up and my hands could only stand a couple of hours of sanding every night.

The bed is solid as a rock with 6/4 posts, 5/4 rails and 4/4 slats to support the mattress. The headboard is 42” tall and the footboard is 33” tall. The first people to use it will be my folks. Hopefully, it will meet with my Dad’s seal of approval since he is the person that got my started in woodworking.

There are a couple of design issues I realized once it was finished. The head board detail needed a second walnut column on both sides and the cloud lift pieces should have been longer to fill the empty area. The cloud lift detail on the headboard should have also been moved up a couple of inches so the bottom section is more visible.

-- Earl "I'm a pessamist - generally that increases the chance that things will turn out better than expected"