Cat Bed DIY No Screw | Miniature Dolls Bed / Pet Bed

Please watch the video to familiarise yourself with the process.

You will need:

• Scrap wood
• Scrap wood bed slats
• A hand saw or jigsaw cutter
• Clamps or a vice
• Sturdy table or a woodwork bench
• Ruler
• Pencil
• Paint or wood stain
• Wood glue
• Sandpaper or palm sander (depending on the condition of your wood)
• Fabric
• Foam
• Double sided tape or fabric glue
• Pillow stuffing
• A cat (optional if you're making this for a doll!)

My cat was around 50cm you may want to make you bed a bit bigger or smaller than mine, depending on the size of you cat!

For the frame you will need to cut out the following pieces

Headboard

• width 30cm
• length 15cm
• thickness 1.5

Sides x2

• length 50cm
• width 4cm
• thickness 1.5

Footboard

• width 30cm
• length 8cm
• thickness 1.5

Slats x4

• width 5cm
• length 29cm
• thickness 1cm

Optional extra

• draw a cats head on the wood and cut this out to stick onto the headboard

You may want to make a larger or smaller bed depending on the size of your cat, if so ensure that the width of the headboard and footboard are equal and the length of the sides are equal, lastly make sure the slats will fit and not stick out the sides.

Now that you've cut all the pieces you can sand them and then paint them!

You may not need to sand down your wood, this will depend on the quality of wood you have and whether or not the paint or wood stain you have requires you to sand the wood down. I used Rust-Oleum furniture paint, this dries very quickly which is good as you don't have to wait ages before moving onto the next step!

For this step, it's good to watch the video.

There's 3 ways to go about this.

1 - Difficulty easy: Skip this step and glue the slats straight on top of the sides of the bed.

2 - Difficulty medium: Measure the width of the the slat, and the depth. Mine are 5 cm wide and have a 1cm depth(thickness). So you need to mark out on one side of the frame 4 markings, equal distances apart, just over 5cm in width and with a 1cm depth, then line up the other side of the bed and draw the markings in the same place. I used two clamps either end of the two pieces to keep them together. You will then need to cut this whole piece of wood out so that the slat can sit in the gap.

3 - Difficulty hard: Similar to number 2 mark out the width and the depth of you slat, but instead of going the whole way through the side of the bed frame, only go half way. You will need to chisel this out and may need to shorten your slats so that they fit between the two sides. I attempted this but my wood split so i had to go with step 2.

Once you have marked out where your grooves are going to be, you either need to chisel them out or cut them out with your jigsaw/handsaw. If doing number like I ended up doing, you will need to cut the left and right hand side of each groove and then make loads of little cuts in-between up to the marked line for the depth, then cut across all the little cuts until you can cut along the depth marker line.

You will probably end up with grooves like I did, as you can see in the pictures, so you will need to sand these down with sand paper or with a palm sander.

If any of this doesn't make sense, please leave a comment and watch the video and it will make more sense when you see the process.

Put the bed together and make sure everything fits and lines up correctly, this is where you can fix any mistakes (if you made them!) before you glue the bed together.

When you're happy with how it's lined up and going to fit together you can start gluing it in place. I used gorilla wood glue, I glued on the head board and foot board first and then all of the slats and lastly the cat head. I left the glue to bond for half an hour and then used a square clamp to keep it nice and tight. I let this dry for 24 hours before removing the clamp.

To finish off the bed, I used foam to make a mattress. I cut the foam base off of an old memory foam pillow and then cut it to fit the size of the bed. I then put this inside and old t-shirt and tucked the excess t-shirt fabric underneath so that it was nice and tight around the foam mattress and placed this onto the bed frame. You can pick up foam from a craft store and use a piece of fabric to make a sheet if you don't have the items like I did to hand.

I also made a pillow from a fabric sample from a sofa shop, you can usually get these for free! Cut out a shape that resembles and unfolded envelope. I folded the fabric over and then stuck the sides together with double sided tape leaving one opening, I then stuffed this using the pillow stuffing from another old pillow. Old pillows are great for craft projects so I keep them in the cupboard. Once I had stuffed the pillow enough, I tucked the flap into the pillow and used some more double sided tape to secure this. Alternatively, you can buy some fabric and stuffing from a craft store.

Lastly I used some spare fabric I had to put a cover/blanket on top of the bed to complete the look.

I understand this is quite a long and may be complicated to understand, I'm not always the best at explaining things, please watch the video in your own time. Please feel free to post a comment or ask any questions if anything is unclear.

Thanks for reading :)

P.s.

Maze still likes sleeping on the sofa ;)