One Room Challenge Week 2
One Room Challenge Week Two - for the love of teak! The next two weeks are all about building the new platform for our bed as we need to have it in place before we can start on the electrical updates. This week's goals were about sourcing the lumber and getting the stain right. We might be crazy but we are trying to stain match fir to our existing teak furniture. If you want an overview of this project you can read my Week One update here.
To rewind a bit - we had a queen bed custom made in walnut in 2014. It was stunning (as you can see below). It had built in storage and matching nightstands. When we upgraded to a king mattress last year it started a snowball effect of changes. The new mattress meant we needed a dresser as we lost the storage under the bed. We got a great deal on a beautiful vintage teak highboy dresser. Once we had the dresser I wanted night stands to match. Finding a pair of vintage teak nightstands is a challenge - finding a pair of nightstands that match a specific style of vintage furniture is even harder. But, I found a pair back in January and on an impulse bought them and had them shipped across the country. Once they arrived and I took a closer look I realized they were very low. The new mattress on it's platform was 27 inches high, the nightstands only 19 inches! I should have measured before I bought them but I thought, it's ok, we'll find a new platform that will be low profile and the right height. Well - that was proven to be just about impossible. Everything easily available is too high as modern beds and nightstands are much higher than vintage. So, to solve this height issue, we're building the platform ourselves!
Here's a shot of the bed beside the nightstand - there is about 8 inches difference right now - we're trying to get it down to about 1 or 2 inches. To be clear a nightstand 'should' be around the same height or slightly higher for maximum comfort in a bedroom. However since we're dealing with vintage and it's very outdated height we're going to do our best. The highboy is a bit lighter in colour but they have a similar leg design and they both have the inset wood handles.
We are building a platform bed based off a wood working plan I found on Etsy. We've made some modifications which I will detail out in the next post. We're using Fir for the outside vs standard lumber to give it a slightly more elevated look. Smooth grain Fir has a 'similar' look to Teak and it much cheaper and easier to source than actual Teak. Fir doesn't take stain very evenly but we are going to do our best to match the stain to the existing teak in the room. We have vintage legs that we are going to add to the frame that are 4 inches, the frame will be 3 inches so the total for the platform should be 7 inches plus the mattress should be the total height to 21 inches. I am hoping my math is correct!
This week - in addition to our first trip to Home Depot - I've managed to do one coat of stain on the Fir but the Salem colour is too light so I need to head back to the store to find a deeper colour. The board is closer to the Oak floors vs the Teak dresser. I've made another trip to get a darker gel stain in Candlelight. It is much closer but I will have to continue staining into Week 3. Colour matching stain is proving more difficult than I anticipated!
