Don’t be jealous, but we are living at the height of luxury around here lately. Check this out:

You saw that right: our mattress no longer sits directly on the floor. It is separated from the carpet by nine inches of the most incredible spectacle of human engineering ever seen… on this blog… today.

That’s the platform which we will reupholster for our bed (More on the bed here and at the links at the bottom of this post.) It still needs legs. This first part probably took us 1.5 or 2 hours total. I’m posting a how-to for this part alone, because a post on how to build the entire bed at once would take up the whole interwebs.

This is what this bad boy is going to look like all assembled. Except in the picture, it looks like it’s not perfectly square, or perhaps space has been warped into some other dimension. That is not the goal for the finished product. Click on the photo to bring up a larger version with all the measurements laid out for you.

1. Cut all your boards. Here’s a handy cut list for a queen-sized bed:

2. If at all possible, you want to assemble this in the room where it will live. It’s gonna be heavy, and once it’s upholstered, there’s no breaking it down into parts for easy transport.

Lay your nine-inch-wide plywood boards on end like this:

And screw them together. If you’re a total noob like me and you’re already getting concerned about what kind of screw to use, how to screw it in, yada yada, Andy tells me you can relax. He actually used drywall screws and promises that whatever you use will probably be a-okay. He’s giving you a thumbs-up to use whatever’s handy. But probably not Elmer’s glue, deal?

Note that at this stage, the platform makes an excellent obstacle course for small people.

3. Add your side cross-board supports. Andy has a two-inch-wide straight-edge (that long straight metal thing in the picture), so he clamped that to the top and used the width as a template. He drew a pencil line below it, and screwed the side cross-board support in right up against the pencil line. This might make more sense by looking at the pics.

Drawing the pencil line:

Support board is screwed in along the pencil line, two inches from the top of the plywood strip:

You only really need the side cross-board supports along the long ends of the bed, not on all four sides. We didn’t realize this until we were done, so we get extra credit for unnecessary work and expense. WOO!

4. Add your center cross-board supports. I’m talking about these guys going down the middle:

If you’re smarter than we are and didn’t put in the unnecessary cross-board supports on the short ends of the bed, you’ll be screwing these right into the plywood, two inches from the top.

Sorry for the change in lighting here. We took a quick break to attend to one very cute one-year-old, and didn’t get started again until after dark.

(Newsflash: babies do not understand that it would be better for them to continue a nap until all of your most pressing projects are complete, and you will wake them when you’re ready for them.)

5. Now it’s time to screw in your cross-boards. We used 12 evenly-spaced boards, but there’s nothing magic about that number.

Make sure everything is square as you go:

Then, plop your mattress on top and wave buh-bye to your boxspring. You won’t be needing that bad boy anymore, because you just built your own using wood, metal and tender-loving care.

You could actually add legs, stain the frame and stop here for a raised platform bed, like this one from Pottery Barn:

You could even upholster just the frame and forego the headboard, like this one from West Elm:

Heck. You could inscribe hieroglyphics in the side, paint it pink polka-dots and set it on fire. Because it’s yours and it is infinitely customizable. How ’bout that?

Or, you could stick with us as we recut the headboard, then upholster everything, screw in the legs and wonder why we didn’t finish it sooner.

Update: Check out the other bed-related posts, where we:

• Built a bed
• Decided to scrap it and start over
• Talked about how to choose a great upholstery fabric
• Chose a fabric… then changed our (okay, my) mind
• Shared our supply list and cut a headboard
• Upholstered the bedframe and upholstered the headboard
• Added the legs and finishing touches