Looking to make a “fairly basic, simple design,” Cookie headed to Google to get some design ideas. The family had a bunch of wood that had “sat in the garden for a number of years” that was left over from their home renovation, and it had developed a cool “weathered” look. Simon fed each plank of wood through a planer purchased for him for Christmas by Sophia in order to smooth and level the wood. The use of the planer “just made this project so much easier,” said Cookie.
Step 2: Make the bed posts
To make the bed posts, Cookie used recycled fence posts from their backyard. He determined this project would use mortise and tenon joints, which create strong, durable joints that lock into place and surround the wood. That’s a sharp pivot from his previous projects, which were mostly items that were “screwed together.” On each of the fence posts, Cookie marked out where he wanted the three large mortise holes to be.
Using a drill, he drilled 20-mm-wide holes to create the space for the tenon joints to lock in. “I started off basically just drilling holes into the wood,” said Cookie, who continued in a straight line up and down the wood to make the mortise holes into long rectangles. To chip away the rounded bits, he used a chisel, which he felt “not very experienced with.” Still, he just kind of “hammered away at it” to create the mortise holes in the wood. This was the hardest part of the process since the mortise holes “kind of go all the way through the solid oak posts, and have to be quite accurate,” he noted.
Step 3. Cut the tenons
Once he finished the posts, Cookie needed to cut the tenons on the sides of the bed so they could fit into the holes in the posts. To thin out the wood, Cookie had to plane off some of the thickness.
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