When my daughter said she would like to have a bed for her dolls it seemed to me as something I would be able to realise quite easily out of some leftover wooden bed slats (2x6cm) lying around.
After making some sketches (at which I'm terrible) I was able to draw something with which she was satisfied. (Would have been easier though if she would have said from the beginning that she wanted something similar as she has at grandmother's 😊)
She showed me some of her dolls for us to determine which dimensions the bed would need to be. As I was planning to use a small pillow as a mattress for the bed I also had to take its dimensions into consideration. We decided to make the bed 54cm long, 36cm wide and 38cm high.
Some little sketches allowed me to determine the lengths needed for the slats. The whole bed is basically made up out of 2x6cm slats. For the top profiles I ripped them in half to get 2x3cm slats.
I put 3 bed slats on top of each other and quickly 'gang' cut my way through them:
A little difficulty was added because the slats have rounded edges. The side panels of the bed wouldn't look nice if I would just be joining them like that. I took a round router bit and cut some round grooves in the ends of the horizonal boards for the sides. The router bit wasn't perfectly matching the profile of the slats but I was expecting that glue would fill up any voids. In the top right of below left picture you can see the grooves in the slats and the right picture shows them glued together.
The next thing I did was to drill holes from some dowels in all the different parts. I also drilled some holes in the lower horizontal slats to put some dowels in to support a board for the mattress.
Before starting the assembly I gave all the parts a good sanding.
As a final step before assembly I tried to dry-fit both side panels to see if everything would match. The final assembly for the glue up was a little difficult because of the intermediate rods (8mm) but I managed. Once both side panels were glued and clamped I let them dry overnight before starting the final assembly.
Once both side panels were dry I glued them together with the front and backside slats.
To reinforce the bed a little (probably unnecessarily, but it gave me a better feeling) I glued some additional wooden blocks in the lower corners. Once dried, I drilled thru them and put some dowels in with some glue.
The picture also shows the dowels which I added to support the board for the mattress.
Finally I cut some laminated hard board from an old closet to size to have a support for the mattress.
A proper sanding, a small pillow as a mattress and some little blankets as bedsheets were the final steps in this little project.
As for painting the bed: my daughter said she will paint it herself!
