ORC Week 3 | All About that Scrap Wood Storage Bed

Welcome to the end of week three in the Fall One Room Challenge. For those of you visiting for the first time, I’m Michelle – and I bring DIY to life here on Breaking Down the Box. I have been transforming our master bedroom from a drab, forgotten afterthought to a gorgeous, Country-French retreat over the past three weeks. Read more about what’s been going on with the links below:

Week 1 | Week 2

Note: Some of the links below are affiliate links, which means if you click through to make a purchase, at no additional cost to you, I will earn a small commission.

This week has been all about the stress. It’s good because I love this stuff, but I’m talking this kind of week:

• Lunches consisted of pudding snack packs and crackers on most occasions.
• I’ve been running on 5-7 hours of sleep most nights, which for me is killer (in a bad way).
• I’m currently eating my breakfast with my toddler’s spoon because I need to do dishes so badly.
• Piles of laundry are taking over my world.

I am still not entirely convinced I will finish this thing on time, but I sure will be driving hard to the finish line. Trying to keep up with all of my life obligations while tackling this thing has proven really challenging, especially this past week. I dedicated my entire week to the main staple of the room – the scrap wood storage bed.

Part of my approach to these challenges is that I do almost everything myself – including building or refinishing almost all of the furniture that will go into the design.

Last spring with the cabin bed, I spaced it out over the course of 5 weeks while I focused on flooring, molding and repainting. This time around, I know I have a list of projects a mile long and I wanted to accomplish this build in record time.

Using a plan from Ana White DIY, the storage bed build took about two weeks and included a few late nights. To be fair, though, I was also trying to reupholster a chair!

So today, after many late nights and curse words in some instances, I present to you – the platform storage bed build!

I have a detailed build post here – but I wanted to give you a quick rundown since it took up most of my life over the past two weeks.

Key Takeaways

• – Buy additional 1×3 or 1×4 boards (probably both) to make sure you have enough wood for the drawer faces and sides of the benches – if you are going for the scrap wood look but don’t have enough scrap wood, you are going to need it.
• – Finish one bench at a time – your work space will get c-r-o-w-d-e-d if you have limited space like I do. It was helpful to move the finished benches into the room to clear out space for the next.

• – Drawer installation hack – instead of just measuring each and every slide on the inside of the benches, measure your first distance and cut a spacer board to help ensure each assembly is exactly the same.

• – Dry fit your drawer faces if you are doing the scrap wood jigsaw puzzle like I did. I had to rip boards and make multiple cuts in order for it all to match.

• – When you secure your drawer faces, make sure you have a little spacer board, or shim, to give you a little breathing room when you are closing the drawers.
• – You will save money sourcing items from Amazon – I found my drawer hardware, pocket hole screws and more for half the price!

While I am super proud of this build, I am a little discouraged that the actual room doesn’t look much different. Most of the progress was being made in my garage!

That should be changing from this week forward, though.

To Do List:

• – The fabric comes in for the exterior of that chair, so I will finish reupholstering the chair probably this upcoming week – exciting!
• – Build the barn door – this should be another fun, very achievable DIY project!
• – Remove the pocket door and hang the new barn door.
• – Build or buy a headboard. At this point, I might start browsing Facebook Marketplace for some inexpensive headboards that I love because I am getting into crunch time. That is part of my plan B.
• – Start purchasing decor items – bedding, curtains, fabric accents for the window treatments, paintings.
• – Paint the furniture – I might have a paint sponsor coming through, but even if I don’t, I will still need to repaint the furniture!
• – Find nightstands! We have two PERFECT end tables from our living room that I really wanted to use, but my husband absolutely refused to let me paint them. I just don’t think the dark wood that they currently are boasting would really work in the bedroom image I have in my head.
• – Find a side table for that chair. What an awkward, lonely chair that would be with no table beside it?
• – Hang up the windows – I worked on those antique windows and found a gorgeous wreath from Homespun Farmhouse that I just fell in love with. I am probably going to feature that on the main wall across from the bedroom.
• – Get my rug in and disassemble the entire bed just to reassemble it on top of the new rug. I know.. how inefficient. But I just had to show you guys the final product of this magnificent bed!

I think the barn door build will be a lot quicker than the storage bed was and I hope to have the main bulk of it built in maybe 1-2 days. Wouldn’t that be awesome? Then I would have so much more time to focus on the rest of my list.

Until next week!

Head over to my Instagram – @breaking_down_the_box for details on my builds, refinishing, upholstering and who knows what other DIY projects I come up with on this One Room Challenge!

To get your fill of other One Room Challenges, check out the guest participants and featured designers this round!