Working with wood and rocks inside

     With the exception of all the granite remnants lying around my house, I guess my current indoor stone projects are pretty much limited to making fossil jewelry.

     I've been learning how to wield the Dremel tool and figuring out which of the numerous little bits will accomplish the desired result.  I also bought a basic rock tumbler, not to turn shards into marbles but to polish some of the fossils and beach rocks a little better than I can easily achieve with the Dremel.  Back in the day, a friend gave me a barrel rock tumbler.  I used it, mostly with agates, but it was an exacting beast.  All the dire warnings about how even one grain of the wrong polishing grit would DESTROY all my rocks.  All the rinsing and scrubbing!  Ugh!  The fossils from the Peace River are, conveniently, already very smooth.  I just want to finish them off.

     My home wood projects became fairly involved once I bought my house in Florida.  I had taken to admiring the Asian and Southeast Asian daybeds I was seeing at the local import stores but the price tag put them out of my reach.  

     I had been playing around with simple wood projects for years and something compelled me to give it a try:  if you can't buy it, make it!

     I devised a full size daybed with a canopy to set in a corner of my oversize dining room.  I imagined myself reclining on it, gazing out my big glass patio doors.  One of my exes owns a small saw mill and works exclusively with untreated southern yellow pine.  His product requires knot-free boards so he ends up with a certain amount of wood waste, still perfectly nice boards.  Free wood is awesome but I still had to buy a lot: wide pine boards for the lattice and oak bannister rails to top the lattice and like a fool, I chose premium pine boards for the actual platform which no one sees because it is always covered with the pad that I bought at IKEA.

     I didn't have a plan and made little sketches as I went along and the thing is kind of uneven but you couldn't tell just by looking and I have gotten so much use out of it!

     But I wanted more...always more!

     I wanted a queen size platform bed for my room.  I hate box springs and never looked back since I started using platform beds.  I did a little more planning on this one but, like the boat builder that can't get his boat out of the basement, I started this in my guest room and quickly realized I couldn't get it through my doorways into the master bedroom.

     You can see on the leg in the foreground that I had to saw the bottoms off and reattach them with pegs once I got the thing into my bedroom.  The back leg is a little iffy so whenever I have to shift the bed for anything, I use the tire jack from my car to stabilize it first.

     This bed was planned to hold a queen size mattress from IKEA and it's my favorite mattress ever.  

     One of my friends jokingly said it looks like a crib but to me, it's a super comfy refuge from the rest of the world and I look forward to retiring there every evening.

     And check out the groovy wooden child stairs I found on the curb.  They make a perfect dachshund loading ramp.