Adventures of a 1st time home owner
My wife and I purchased our first house recently. It has just about everything that we could hope for: Larger bedrooms for us and our son, a yard, deck, and front porch on which to hang out, a craft room for my crafty spouse, and a home office for me. This newly acquired property has sparked in me a tremendous excitement about the possibilities.
What started as purchasing a power tool or two to fix things up around the house, has turned into a hunger for do-it-yourself stuff. There are many things which need to be done to make this old house we now own into the dream home we envision. I know that doing these things on my own will be the cheapest way to go. So I have committed myself to installing wood paneling throughout our entire first floor, building several pieces of furniture including a desk, platform bed and shelving, painting, repairing fences and porches, etc.
My first major project is designing a computer desk for my office and a platform bed for our master bedroom. I’m a novice at working with wood and a complete newbie to design software. So after looking around a bit, I decided to learn Google’s Sketchup and use that as the basis of my design work. I took measurements of my new home-office and recreated the room in 3D. Then I went about designing the desk to fit things like dual monitors, a full size MIDI keyboard, speakers and amps, as well as a couple of desktop computers.
The king size platform bed is pretty straight forward. I am making two identical twin sized platforms and locking them together. Each platform has three legs made of 4″ x 4″ posts. The sides of the frame are 2″ x 6″ x 78″ inch beams. The ends are 2″ x 6″ x 38″ beams. The crossbeams are 1″ x 4″ x 3′. I cover them with a 3/4″ x 36″ x 76″ sheet of particle board.
After a couple of revisions I came up with what you see below. I have a few concerns about whether the desk, as designed can be assembled by me, whether it will hold the weight I need it to hold, and how I’ll finish the desktop so that it will be both comfortable and functional. All the framing is designed to be 2″ x 2″ wood posts. The desktops will likely be 3/4″ particle board and the side panels 1/2″ plywood. I intend to use wood screws to assemble everything, after pre-drilling all the guide holes. Joining everything with butt joints makes me a bit nervous, but I think it should work.
If you have any suggestions or comments, please feel free to share. I’m posting these models to the Google Sketchup 3D warehouse, so you can view them in all their glory at that site. I’m probably going to first build the platform bed, followed by the desk. Check back here for updates to see how things turned out. I have a few worries about some of the fine details. Hopefully I’ll get answers to some of my questions before the building is done.












