The Handbuilt Bedroom, pt. 6: Drawers

Last night I was visiting with a friend and she told me she had missed seeing anything new on my blog!  It’s been two weeks since I posted last—two weeks of crazy business with lots of projects inside the house.  So it’s not that I lack for things to write about, I just lack motivation to write at the end of the day!

It’s time to get back to “The Handbuilt Bedroom” projects.  You can see the other posts here:

• Part 1:  Inception
• Part 2:  The Walls
• Part 3:  The Dresser
• Part 4:  The Bed
• Part 5:  The Chalkboard

The plan was always to build drawers for the queen-size storage bed, according to Ana White’s plans.  The drawers for the dresser were SUCH a royal pain in the patootie though, that it took me a while to work up the ambition to tackle the project. (You can see the bed frame build here.)

Here’s what I learned, though…it is a far, far easier thing to build drawers out of plywood rather than boards.  Far, FAR easier!  Gotta love those nice straight pieces.

I chose to use 1/2” plywood for my drawers rather than 3/4”.  It’s only a little cheaper, but significantly lighter!

Above you can see my little drawer modification.  Ana White’s drawer plans have you build a four-sided drawer box, and then you end up attaching the drawer front to the box.  It uses a LOT of wood, and your drawer faces are so thick that the bolts that come with the drawer pulls are too short to use without countersinking them.  When building the dresser drawers—I found that incredibly annoying.

So rather than building a double-thick drawer front, I used scrap plywood (and 1x3’s when I ran out of scraps) to build just enough of a short front piece to hold the drawer square.  For the six BIG drawers I built for the bed, it probably saved a half-sheet of plywood.

The drawers are not deep back-to-front, but they are VERY deep top-to-bottom!  I lot of people modify them to make them deeper, but in my son’s narrow room it simply didn’t make sense.  He still gained a ton of extra storage.

I used 3/8” hobby stock birch to trim out the drawer fronts.  It’s expensive—but so nice that it’s already perfectly smooth and straight!

So there you have it…drawers for the Farmhouse Bed.  This is a great bed thanks to Ana White’s terrific plans, and I think it could outlast an earthquake!

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