How To Build a Loft Bed

When my wife and I moved back to NYC last year, our new apartment was still packed to the gills despite some significant downsizing. Since we moved into a turn-of-the-century brownstone in Brooklyn with high ceilings, a loft bed with plenty of storage space seemed ideal. After our wedding, we promised to treat ourselves to a brand new queen-sized tempurpedic mattress.

The hunt was on, but after some local inquiries, we discovered that major furniture stores simply don't carry queen-sized loft beds. They can be special-ordered, but only at great expense. The more I looked at pictures online of loft beds, the more confident I was that I could design and build one myself. Soon I found myself designing what would become the largest and heaviest object I had ever built (and one that had to be sturdy enough to hold two adults and three cats for several hours at a time).

I erred on the safe side, and overbuilt the heck out of it. I planned on using 2x6's and 2x4s for the framing, and plywood for the mattress platform, and put together with bolts, nuts, and washers.

My father and grandfather both spent time as draftsmen at some point in their careers, so I suddenly found myself with a board set up with graph paper, meticulously laying the bed out to scale in three dimensions.


The construction itself took a lot more time and effort than I anticipated (this is always the case), especially hoisting the heavy bedframe up onto its 5.5 foot tall legs.


In the end it worked out wonderfully - sturdy, clean, with about 160 cubic feet of storage space!


This past month we moved yet again, so I broke the bed down into pieces the movers could handle. Since our new place has lower ceilings, and we've downsized even more in the past year, I chopped the legs down to a more reasonable height. It still has plenty of space underneath, but climbing into bed isn't as much of an ordeal.

Enjoy this stop motion video I took of the bed's reconstruction. It was hot as the dickens while I was doing it, and I was a bit reticent about putting a video up of me in shorts and an undershirt. But then I read this article about ITP students vs. MIT Media Lab students and figured f*ck it. Enjoy!


The song accompanying the video above is called "Green Thumb" written by the lovely Ann Courtney (now frontwoman of the band Mother Feather). I helped arrange and engineer this tune in 2005.

Hacking Together a Scrapwood Box

I just can't stand to throw my scrapwood in the trash. Unfortunately, it tends to pile up after a while, and I'm forced to think of new ways to use it. As you may know, in the past I made scrapwood shelves that seemed to be a success, so this time I tried my hand at making a scrapwood box for holding some of my materials.

I had been using a cardboard box that was slowly disintegrating, so this was definitely a step up. Like scrapwood projects I've done before, I set myself some ground rules. I used all pieces of wood as I found them in my scrap bucket, no additional cuts were allowed, and the only fasteners I used were screws and nails.

It's great to not only have created something new, sturdy, and unique, but due to the scrapwood's involvement in prior projects, the box itself becomes a chronology of my own work. I can point to the black bottom and remember that it used to be part of my workbench, then became a TV stand, and finally was dismantled, with the tabletop becoming my drafting board.

Other pieces have stories too, and I'm reminded of them whenever I dig around in this box now.

Enjoy this time-lapse video of the build. The backing track is "A Scene Unseen" by Kinetic.

Mighty Cat Scratching Post

I've been a cat owner for a while, and (through research and patience) have found the solution to keeping feline friends from ripping apart my couch.

Half the battle is in giving your cats a sturdy scratching post - nice and tall so they can stretch out, bottom heavy so it won't tip over, and made of something they can dig into, like sisal hemp.

I saw the opportunity to build these when visiting the Tilly Foster Farm in Brewster NY, where they happened to be demoing a host of antique farm equipment engines. One of the exhibits was a working 2 horsepower dragsaw, slicing cookies off a giant tree limb. The owner was letting people take the cookies for free, so I helped myself to two.

These became the bases for my mammoth scratching posts.

First I drilled out and cut a nice big circular hole in the center using my jigsaw.


Then I traced an identical circular piece out of plywood, with which I could attach the actual post (2x4s with the corners cut, then wrapped and stapled with 1/2" sisal rope) with screws. Once done, I drilled some nice beefy screws diagonally into the piece of tree limb to keep it steady, making sure to countersink the screws and fill in all the gaps with my homemade wood filler (screened sawdust and wood glue).


Next I thought up a novel way to make the tops of the post look nice, because they had just the end strand of the sisal stapled to the top - not too aesthetically pleasing and not too pleasant for cats either. So I found a smaller branch that was the same diameter, and cut it to size, making sure to make a crevice for the sisal to sit (first sketched out with a sharpie, then routed out with a spade bit and a rasp bit)




Liked it so much I built another!

Frankenstein Guitar Amplifier Build

I'm moving from the country to the city soon, and have been making a steady attempt to consolidate and downsize beforehand.




I've had several dead and dying guitar amplifiers in my workshop for quite some time, and I had ruminated enough on how I was going to hack them all together into something unique. So, check out the pic and video of it below, and be sure to read the
instructable for some more detail about how this was all done.







Frankenstein Guitar Amp Build - More DIY How To Projects

Report from the Cold Spring Craft Fair

For it being our first craft fair, it went very well. We weren't concerned with making money, so much as observing people's reactions to our creations.


The scrapwood shelves turned a lot of heads, but a lot of the time there would be a man being interested in them and his wife pulling him away. :) But I did sell one piece, to a happy Martin W (who works for a NYC design firm, and is keeping my card on file - yippee!) pictured here. When he bought it he said he won't "ruin it by putting knick-knacks on it."



Does this make me an artist? One woman said my shelves reminded her of Louise Nevelson, and when I admitted to not knowing who that was, she said "shame on you!" I tried explaining to her that I'm not an artist - this was just something I like to do, but this didn't seem to quell her agitation. All the same I take it as a compliment. It led me to check out Nevelson's work, which I really dig! And read this quote from her:


"When you put together things that other people have thrown out, you’re really bringing them to life – a spiritual life that surpasses the life for which they were originally created."


I can run with that...

Scrapwood Shelving for Knick-Knacks and Tchotchkes

My wife, Melody and I have been hard at work all this week in preparation for the Cold Spring River Festival. Melody designs and sews some awesome and hilarious apparel, and I'll be selling all different sorts of things made from recycled and repurposed materials.


It doesn't take me a lot of time to accumulate all sorts of scrap lumber from different projects, and I can't bear to see it go to waste, so I designed and built these shelf units that are perfect for keeping your odds and ends and action figures and bric-a-brac that you don't know what to do with.


I tried to make everything look a bit less hacked together by filling in the gaps (with homemade wood filler made from screened sawdust and wood glue) with a putty knife, shaping it with the jigsaw, and sanding everything down.


I've got some other tricks up my sleeve for our table at the festival, but I really do hope a couple of these pieces sell.

The Story of My Sockets

People come into tools for all different reasons - you might have the $40,000 super precision Snap-On Set, or the Chinese plastic molded toolkit you bought in Bushwick when you were scraping by as a college student. Maybe you've inherited some tools - maybe you've bought some specifically for a job, and even today when digging around you can still recall the exact circumstances in which you were made to acquire it.


For most of us it's a combination of all these things, and probably more. This motley set of sockets has come into my possession through many miles and at least a couple of generations. It was always my father's habit to throw his sockets into a box and go hunting for the right one when necessary. But I had just organized my drill bit collection (just as motley, and organized just the same way-back-when by my father) and wanted to put it to use.


I dumped out all the sockets and separated them by metric (aqua) and English (natural) units, then organized by size. After drilling the right sized holes for each piece, I had fashioned my very own socket organizer, perfectly tailored for my needs. It cost nothing but the few pieces of scrap wood I had, and if I ever acquire more sockets I can just cut out the parts I need to change - keep it ever-evolving. And by the way, I'll always remember that the aqua bits were from the picket gate I rescued from the trash to make tomato stakes with.


The easy route would have been to go to sears and buy the super-duper socket set and make sure to keep it organized, but this way I can append some pride to the whole matter - make do with my own design, and come to find that I'm actually the better for it. Now these sockets rest in a drawer in a dentist's cabinet in my basement (scored that gem with the marble base for 50 bucks at a barn sale). Again, it's a matter of seeking the alternative for the better, not just to settle for less, but to push for more! This is what "pushing the other button" is all about. When something seems too easy, or you're not quite getting the satisfaction from your work or yourself you think you should, go ahead and try the other thing - push the other button. You could surprise yourself with what happens...

Artistic Interpretation of The Cube Root of Three

     My wonderful sister is a high school math teacher, and in our family the geek apple doesn't fall too far from the tree. With that in mind, I made this extra-special birthday present for her this past year. For a native New Yorker you might pronounce this "Da Cube Root o Tree" - It's a wire frame papier mache tree sitting atop a wood cube, with the cube root of three expressed in different ways on the four visible facets of the cube - decimal, hexadecimal, binary, and integral (click here for pic showing the other two facets).

     For the cube, not only did I not have a thick enough piece of wood available, but I was eager to experiment with a method of scrap wood laminating I read on Lifehacker a while back. With wood glue, clamps, and varnish, I was able to make a durable, interesting looking cube for the base. I then stenciled and spray painted the letters and numbers, and spray-lacquered the whole thing.

      For the tree, I shaped a wire frame, then covered it in papier mache - old school, like in kindergarten with water, white glue, and newspaper. After applying green spraypaint and letting it dry, I hit the tree with some 3M Super 77 spray adhesive, and rolled it around in soil. After brushing off the loose bits, I lacquered it several times to keep it all together.

     Epoxy holds the two pieces together, and now it sits on my sister's desk, awaiting the curiosity and/or bewilderment of her students.

Thinking Inside the Box

     I'm a pretty decent wood butcher - have slapped together a compost bin, workbench, shelves, even an adirondack chair made of shipping pallets. But what I've never tried to do is a carpentry project that fits edges together snugly, where everything is perfectly square, and it looks somewhat decent (like a wood surgeon would do it?)
     So, after feeling restless and watching this video, in which Adam Savage claims to start going a bit nuts if he isn't regularly building something, I made it an afternoon project to construct a simple, clean, elegant wooden box.
    I must give infinite respect to my friends who are carpenters. It is an art that takes a lot of practice to do well. I feel like my box will hold up for a while, but it ain't the prettiest, nor the straightest thing in the world. All the same, I learned a bit while making it, so it's all good.