Toddler Bed - Design

The next project in the list was supposed to be the pantry organizer.  However, with the outfeed table taking as long as it did, and our toddler's growing desire for a "big girl bed" I decided to switch the order of the projects and work on the toddler bed first.

When I did the post awhile back I had an initial design for the bed.

It's a pretty traditional design, nothing too fancy.  Then I stumbled upon this project and it immediately changed my mind on the design.  I love the modern look with the round corners and (most importantly) it looked like a ton of fun for a toddler.   So I went back to SketchUp and came up with version two:

I'm much happier with this design.  I love the lofted idea, our daughter is already trying to climb into her crib at bedtime.  Also I'm excited to make something that just looks like a lot more fun.

This will be made out of maple plywood with four solid hard maple posts.  Being that it's plywood all of those cut-outs are going to expose the manufactured edge.  Originally I wasn't really happy about that.  I thought of using the same iron-on edge-banding that I used with the TV cabinet but for safety reasons it was more important that I be able to round over all of the edges.  While it technically would be possible to create thick edge-banding which could still be rounded over, I felt it would add a considerable amount of time on to the build.  So I've decided it's not the worst thing.

There will be a couple of challenges with this build.  First off all of the rounded corners are going to take a little more work.  I'll be trying to create templates then using a router with a template guide to accomplish these cuts.  Also this is my first attempt at knockdown furniture so it should be interesting figuring out how to hold everything together with nuts and bolts and trying to hide them as best as possible.

First thing will be trying to make the templates and testing out the router guides.