I decided on a few alterations of my bed plan. The benefit was that I could use (with only slight altertions) the same parts I had already purchased. Since I’m a teacher, I used my connections to get in touch with the high school shop teacher. He agreed to let me come over and work on my bed parts there. It took a while to find a day that worked for both of us, but I finally made it over.

First, I’ve gotta say WOW. How did I not know about shop class when I was in high school??? So many tools, nice layout, powerful drill press. I should have taken photos but I was busy drilling. Oh yeah. I have a serious crush on that drill press. My friend’s drill press stalled out if the bit grabbed too much material, so I was producing a lot of sawdust as I slowly drilled my holes. THIS drill press CHEWED through the wood, producing chunky shavings and drilling deep holes in about 60 seconds!!! Yummy.

Anyhow, my original bed plan had the poles going into my 4×4 legs on the same level. The problem with that is that a 4×4 is really only 3.5×3.5. If you draw a little picture, you’ll see that if you’re drilling 2 inch wide holes, there’s only enough room for the holes to be 1 inch deep (even drilling wide of center). So the poles weren’t set very deeply into the legs, which contributed to the wobbliness. Also, since the poles were all on the same plane, that allowed the bed to wiggle a lot. Lastly, I’d overestimated how tall I wanted the beds. The extra height was unnecessary and adding to the problem. My solution: cut off 6 inches from the tops of my leg posts (thus removing my old holes) and redrill holes which vertically offset the head/foot and side poles. That way I could drill much deeper holes without worrying about them running into each other. I decided to lower the head and foot, because in the old design the head and foot ended up much higher than the middle due to sag. I figured this would help counteract that, since there was a limited amount of sag the higher sides would allow. (Important to me since I like to sleep on my tummy and there’s a limit to how much my back likes to bend that way!)

So the shop teacher used his chop saw to shorten my 4x4s and I got to drill lots of holes 🙂 You know what? It worked!!! My beds are now much sturdier, and don’t have that annoying high head & foot feeling. The legs tend to spay out just a little, which is a good thing as far as stability is concerned, though it does look a little sloppy 😉

I’ve written up walkthroughs for anyone interested in making their own rope bed or straw mattress.