The Fairy Cottage Loft Bed March - July, 2014

About a year ago, I became interested in building Morgan a loft bed. I brought up the idea of the loft bed with my friend (and co-worker), Mark Frye, who is a talented wood-worker (and a geotechnical engineer).
Here's a photo of Mark Frye from when we climbed Mt. Stone in the Olympic Range last summer.
(Below) Mark suggested I look at OP Left Beds online. These photos (above) from OP Loft Beds give you an idea of what I was going for (at first).
It turns out that Mark has some recent experience building loft beds! He built these loft beds (below) for his friend's kids! (Above) Mark showed me a couple of photos of the loft beds that he built. Notice the elegant design of the posts, with all the joints integrated into the post itself. Also notice the recessed bolts and the little shelf on the headboard. All in all, a very nice design. (Below) Mark's loft beds also had these great fascias attached to them, a garage and a castle.
I really liked Mark's design, and the two of us started working on a new design for Morgan's loft bed. We made a few minor improvements to Mark's original design: The new design would allow the loft bed to be reversible, by changing the diagonal brace on the back into a pair of smaller braces, one on each side. We also changed the design of the stairs. I have always loved the look cantilever stairs, and also stairs without railings. (Morgan is pretty agile) We made lots of minor modifications to customize the height, etc. We upgraded a few hardware connections with brass threaded inserts, which are pretty slick. Finally, we took the idea of the fascia and kind of ran with it, making it a little over-the-top fancy.
Loft Bed construction We built the loft bed over at Mark's house. We started by ripping a bunch of lumber down to exactly 1.5" X 1.5" and 1.5" X 3". Then the posts were constructed from the ripped down lumber, which is how all the joints are built to elegantly fit together. We both appreciate a well-documented project. The videos were Mark's idea. We used a camera that took a photo every 10 seconds. The videos below play 20 photos per second. So, the videos make us look about 200 times better than we actually are (which is still pretty good, if I do say so myself).
Building the loft bed: Video loading... Please be patient
Building the fascia: (it was raining, so we mostly built it inside Mark's shop) Video loading... Please be patient
Finish work: (sanding, trim, etc.) Video loading... Please be patient
Final Assembly: (Video, mostly played at high speed) Video loading... Please be patient
The finished product! (except for stain, paint, bedding, and little girl!)

Stain and Paint I took the loft bed home in April and hid it in the garage. In July, I worked on it, in secret, whenever I could.
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Stealthy Assembly
I set up the loft bed while Morgan was at a birthday party at her daycare, and afterwards, while Cynthia took her to Lake Fair. I had about 3-4 hours, which was plenty of time. Video loading... Please be patient
Looking into Morgan's room, you can see the back end of the loft bed and the stairs.
The bed. The new quilt and sham came later that day.
Ta da!
Surprise!!!
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Here's one happy little birthday girl!