DIY Bed to Bench Project

Does this stuff, I don't mean to be giggling, but I am. Does this stuff look to you like a bed or a bench? Cause it looks like a bench to a customer of mine. And this is a thing, I didn't know, but a customer called and they wanted to know if their husband's childhood bed could get turned into a bench to sit on. And I was clueless about this, but a little bit of work on the worldwide. Inter web showed me that this was done very commonly. So here's, first here's what I've got. It's a twin size bed. This is the headboard. This is the foot board. And then the two rails that under normal circumstances connect the headboard and the foot board the mattress that goes on. So she wants me to salvage as much of this as I can. And I think I can do everything without adding any new wood to the deal. So here's, what's going to happen. I'm going to take the foot board and I am fixing to cut it this way down in the middle. Then each half will end up connected. And that part kind of remains to be seen, but connected to the headboard one on this side, one on that side. So when you're done, there'll be some rails down here and that's going to create the bench shape. So it's all working in my head. Let's see if it's going to work in the real world. You know how these projects can sometimes change on the way First step. Let's get this foot board cut into, easiest way to do this was on the table. So. Now eventually the rails are going to get cut again to get to a finalized length uniform length. But this is a way for me to just start dissecting this bed and getting it into individual pieces. But the footboard cut in two, next thing I'm after here is getting everything broken down into individual components, light on the breaking down part. I really want to salvage all of the wooden components. I don't want to add any new wood to this thing. So it's a gentle tapping and prying and pulling trying to persuade these 40 year old pieces to come apart. You've got a staple in the bottom of this joint. This is because this is a commercially made piece and commercially made furniture. It's not uncommon that when they put parts together they put glue in the joint. And then instead of clamping stuff, they drive a nail or a staple through it to bind the parts together until the glue dries. Now a couple things when you're disassembling a piece of furniture, keep in mind, there could be a mechanical fastener down there in addition to glue to this fastener has to come out otherwise. When I go to put all the parts back together and I will use this Morrison 10 and joint again the staple is going to interfere with the parts. So a rotary tool with a cutoff wheel and some delicate work with nose pliers is a good way to do this. It does sound like the worst trip to the dentist ever but this is an effective way to get that fastener out of the bottom of the joint. But the footboard cut in two. My plan is to then join each half of the footboard to the headboard in order to create the sides of the bench. So now what I need to do is create a groove in the headboard. That'll receive that piece of quarter inch plywood so that when everything comes back together, I've got a frame and panel assembly that now includes the headboard. Just basically the same way it was in the footboard. Because the groove starts and stops within the length of the headboard. Plunger router with a fence is the best way to do this. This is not the groove. I just cut. This groove, received metal brackets on the ends of the rails to bind the headboard rails and footboard together. What I'm doing is filling it with two party epoxy that I died with anil and die. This is going to turn it into a design element instead of just a extra groove. The masking tape helps prevent the epoxy from sticking all over the surrounding surfaces. I'll be reusing the existing Morrison tenant joints wherever I can, but I also have to do new joinery. So I'm doing that with Domino's. I like Domino's for this because they're very strong. They're robust. They emulate the strength that you get from a traditional Morrison tenon joint going to work great for this project. Here's the first of many dry fits on this project. This is really a seat of the pants engineering going on here. What I need to do is get this frame in place and then I can measure inside of groove to inside of groove to figure out the width of the panel. That's got to fit inside there. You can start to see now how my brain is working and creating a bench from a bed. And yeah, I'm pretty happy here with how it's actually coming together. Here's a great shot of me screwing up. I'm measuring for the rail. That's going to go across the front of the bench and you'll see later I measure it in the wrong spot. Hey, you want to reuse the rails and the curvy part but I have to separate them. There are dowels that are connecting them together and I couldn't get them to just tap apart. So instead a saw blade in my multi-tool did a great job of snipping, right through those $3 Boom Fly by night engineering here. I'm figuring out what the spread should be on these curvy parts on what's going to be the front rail. Once I got what I wanted, then I cleaned up all the edges. So I could glue the parts together, At this stage of the game, the sides are only dry fitted in place. This part that I'm messing with is a rail. That's going to support the back of the seat once I have it in. So I'm going to bread it to temporarily hold it and then pre drill and drive screws to lock it in place. Well, this is the part in the process where I realized I screwed up. So, rewind the video and look back at when I measured for this rail. And what I realized now is I measured from rail to rail instead of measuring from leg to leg. So the bad news is this rail is not currently the right size. The good news is it's too much long, not too much short. So I'm going to have to take a little off the ends and I'm going to have to take a little off the right and a little off the left to keep the curve details centered and the same size. However, a little bit of trimming redo the slots for the dominoes. And then I will be back to a dry fit here again. So a little bit of rework to do. I got that front rail cut to the right size and redo the joinery. Now I am finally ready to put this together. They want to have this bench sit on a covered front porch. So it's not going to be outside, outside but kind of in an exterior application. So that's why I'm going with type on three on all the joints it's waterproof. This is a great project for assembling in sub steps a way too many pieces to try to do all of the glue up in one fell swoop. It's kind of funny when I go back and look at these videos I guess a really good song was playing there. My ear pieces at the time here. All right, anyway, on with assembly. One thing that makes my life easier is that all these components are already pre-finished. So if I get squeeze out coming out of these joints it's not a big deal to get that glue drip on the front not worried about it because once I've got clamps on this I can take a damp rag and it's going to come right off of that finished surface. I'm sliding this piece down to the floor which is nice and flat to see if it rocks. And if it does at this stage of the game I could still rack the clamps and use that approach to get the rock out of it. The customer didn't want the piece stripped and refinished thing. Thank goodness, but they did want it refreshed. So I'm cleaning it by wiping everything down with denatured alcohol then shooting a coated shellac on it. Once the shellac is dry, I'll hit it with a clear top coat. Now it's time to work on salvaging the fabric on the mattress. The customer wants to see this go on as the cover on the new bench, lots and lots of staples to take out in order to make this happen. And I'm being as careful as I can because I don't want to tear the fabric. Thankfully, that came apart pretty well and the fabric was pretty heavy-duty and in good shape. So I was able to recover it and use it for the bench. The plywood has already been cut to size to fit the bench. Next thing I need to cut the seat foam and here is the best way to cut foam and electric carving knife. Next time you were at a thrift store. If you need to cut foam in your future, grab one of these. It makes short work and easy work of going through foam. I am the first to admit that I am not much of an upholster. I'm okay at it, but I'm not great at it. So I did what a lot of people do. I watched a bunch of YouTube videos, grabbed some secrets and tricks and pulled the fabric here, pull the fabric there and eventually got the seat to look okay. You can just see on the plywood here that on the under side look close, I hit that with a round over router, but before I got to the step so that I'm not pulling the fabric over a sharp corner. Now, part of the key to getting this to look okay is stretching that fabric uniformly. And I didn't. So it's not unusual that you got to go back and take a staple out. Re-stretch put a staple back in. Even the pros on YouTube are taking the same approach with a staple removal idea. Corners are tough. Geez. I can barely make my bed. So it looks okay, much less formed, good corners on an upholstered seat. But part of the key to this is forming pleats like I'm doing here so that the fabric lays flat on the top side, Nick came out okay. Done. I got to admit when the bed came into the shop with the premise of being turned into a bench. I was confused and skeptical, but you know, when it came out okay. And sitting in it and I've had other people sit in it as well, it's more comfortable than I thought it was going to be. So it's kind of an interesting project. Maybe you'll take a run at trying it yourself. One of the things that is pretty cool is that this is about a 40 or so year old bed that otherwise would have gone into a junk pile. They didn't need it anymore as a bed. So converting it to bench, quite a few more years. Came out okay.