Make this heart bed set

The client fell in love with this bed set and wanted the exact same design for her young daughter. Design-A-Bed love making beautiful children's furniture and this heart headboard, heart pedestal and heart kist is one of our favourites.

 

For all you DIY fanatics out there, we are sharing the process involved to make this heart bed set, so that you too can make one. For all our furniture we use 16mm SupaWood. Unlike many other manufacturers that use chipboard or melamine, our children's furniture is able to take the knocks.

We start off with a drawn design that is then transferred onto the boards for cutting. All our cutting is done by hand with a jigsaw. For the heart headboard, we cut out a heart shade, which was also done in the pedestal door and front of the storage box.

The storage box is joined together with wood glue and screws and we fill in all holes with wood filler. A lot of time is spent on sanding the pieces to prepare them for painting. For most orders we cut and make our own feet, but you can fit almost any style, shape or design of feet that you want.

The bedside cabinet is a basic design similar to that of the bedside cabinet featured on Home-Dzine.

The heart headboard, heart bedside cabinet and heart storage box all feature a chicken wire decoration. A heart shape was cut out and chicken wire stapled to the back. This was then attached to the various pieces with No More Nails adhesive.

We paint all our furniture with water-based acrylic paints using a Bosch PFS spray system. After applying a base coat and two additional coats, the furniture is sanded with 400-grit sandpaper before applying a further 3 to 4 coats of paint.

Once the paint is dry, we then sand all the pieces with 1000-grit sandpaper for an ultra smooth finish. Here are some of the pieces after being sprayed and before being finally sanded. The frames and hearts are painted separately and added on at the end.

 

After painting it's time to distress all the pieces. This is done according to the clients' wishes and can be either light or medium distressing. The heart bed set was given a light distress and then finished off with Antique Wax before buffing to a satin finish.