A Round Bed Frame of Dummy Construction

Round bed with frame

We have to admit, we find it touching that so many freelancers think their family members know everything. No one around here thinks that! We already knew of one eHowian who routinely cites her husband (giving him different job titles as necessary), and today we have a new one: she's one Beverlee Brick, who cited her (grand-)father(-in-law?) Gene (a "furniture hobbyist") in a doofus attempt to tell people "How to Build a Round Bed." This eHow post from 2010 lives on at Hunker.com (we're waiting for her to cite Jason....)

Beverlee's problem, besides an obvious lack of experience with building furniture, was that she didn't do any research on her topic. We did, and we found a site that sells round beds with diameters ranging from 76 to 112 inches. That pretty much renders her list of materials (found using archive.org) useless... because she says you need a

"sheet of 3/4 inch plywood"

Well, yeah, if you're gonna make a bed platform, ¾-inch plywood's a good idea. Where you're going to find a sheet of plywood 76 inches on a side, much less 112 inches, we have no idea. We imagine you'll have to make your own...

Beverlee has other problems, of course. She wants readers to make a frame from 1-by-12s screwed together to make a square that is,

..."three-fourths of the diameter of the [bed]..."

The square is assembled by screwing the "1 inch by 12 inch planks" to "2 inch by 4 inch beams"¹ 12 inches long, one in each corner; a dead giveaway that Brick has no idea that a 1-by-12 is only 11¼" wide.

Once that's done, you just screw your sheet of plywood, which has been cut to a circle the size of the mattress, to the square frame. Lay the mattress on top, and you're done.

Well, you're done, according to Brick. We think that the next step is to crawl onto the mattress and ride it to the floor as the frame collapses. The "solution" Beverlee envisioned would only work for a round dog bed perhaps 30" in diameter. It has multiple problems when applied to an actual bed, one for humans:

• Even an 80-inch round bed, about as small as they get, would overhang the frame by 20 inches. A king (112-inch diameter) would overhang by 28 inches. You'd be lucky if the plywood didn't just snap!
• Only a bed 96 inches in diameter or smaller would fit even on two sheets of plywood. The seam(s) would be quite weak.
• The smallest bed, 76", has an unsupported span of almost five feet; the largest bed at 112 inches has a seven-foot gap between the sides of the frame. There's no way it would not sag almost to the floor!

A thoughtful furniture builder would make an octagonal frame with copious bracing within the frame to support the mattress, and stagger the seams of the multiple sheets of plywood needed to make the platform much larger than a single 4' by 8' sheet of plywood. The "plans" concocted by our Dumbass of the Day are not only stupid, they're unsafe. We have no idea why this dreck is even still published!

¹ The use of the words "beam" and "plank" here is a hallmark of eHow freelancers. Go figure.

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