Sweet Pea Cottage

What's a mom to do when she can't choose between the cabin bed, the little cottage loft bed and the sweet pea garden bed? Head over to google sketchup and sketch up a set of plans incorporating favourite aspects of all three beds! This one had been in the planning stages for over a year and I’ve called it “Sweet Pea Cottage”. It took me about 3 months to build in my spare time and I couldn't be happier with how it turned out. Of course our daughter loves it as well! Who wouldn't want to sleep in their own little house bed! :) I used spruce and 3/4" purebond plywood for the main build. To give the plywood panels a planked look, I cut the front into various size rectangles so I could run them through my table saw using a 1/4" dado blade before assembling the pieces together with pocket holes. The roof panels and dormer are 1/4" plywood glued and screwed to a frame and then I used construction adhesive to adhere the dormer to the front roof panel as well as adhere the cedar shakes. Painted with Behr Pure Ultra White and topped with a satin polyacrylic. I left the cedar shakes raw but if I built it again, I think I would top them with some sort of flat or matt sealer as the rough texture makes dusting them a bit difficult. One of the first questions I get is "how difficult is it to make the bed?". Surprisingly it's not that hard. Because the bed is so open on each end and we have it set up in her room with access on three sides, it's easy to manoeuvre the mattress a bit to change the bedding.