I decided to make something larger, more interesting, and more personal but the pressure to do it well brought working on it to a halt. My son is now old enough to move from his crib into a bed, so I decided to make that bed myself. The goal is a bed painted like a firetruck and holding a twin sized mattress with space underneath for a trundle bed. Seems simple enough, but soon the details of the project started to get to me. Things like:

• How tall should it be?
• How will I make the front grill and headlights?
• Should the “windshield” be painted or a physical detail.

Likely 100 other questions were pondered as well before I finally decided to just start. Because at it’s core, how much did I need to know to start?

To make what is essentially a plywood box in the shape of a twin size mattress, it needs to an opening to fit a 75 inch by 38 inch mattress. From those dimensions:

• Add an in each direction for bedding to 76″ by 39″.
• Side rails will fit flush inside front and back panels so they will be 76″ long.
• Front and back panels will need to accommodate the two .75″ plywood sides, so they will be 40.5″ wide.
• 2′ tall is convenient as that is half of a 4’x8′ sheet of plywood.
• The side away from the wall has the bottom 8″ removed to have room for a future trundle bed to slide underneath.
• Edges he could contact with should be rounded over

That is plenty of information to start. Once the frame of the front, sides, and back were cut to the general dimensions above, I just sketched ideas right on the plywood for the cut out where he can get on and off the bed. When I settled on something I liked, I cut it out on one side, then traced it on the other side and cut it to match with a jigsaw and router with a template bit.

Meanwhile, I had plenty of time to think about paint and design choices while looking at some of his toy firetrucks. Eventually, I put that all together into a wonderful colored pencil drawing.

The outlines of the bed were drawn to scale, 2 mm on the paper relating to 1 real inch. That way, after just sketching details like the bumper and grill to what looked right on paper, I could simply measure the sketch and have a rough idea of how large they will be in wood. This was a more natural way for me to decide those dimensions. Before the sketch, decisions like how tall should the bumper be just seemed like arbitrary numbers with no context. This got my mind back on track.

All this is to say that it’s important for me to remember that I don’t need all the details ironed out before starting. I may just need some rough dimensions and colored pencils to get started. From there, the work itself can continue to inspire the details.