This past August I was asked to build a custom hand split cedar bed for a client in Saratoga Beach, on Vancouver Island. I have made beds before and was excited to design and build this king size custom bed. The clients house is near the beach and finished on the inside with milled local pine, so I decided to also use some pine with the red cedar as a contrasting wood in both colour and texture (I used milled, planed and sanded 1×12 pine in the spaces between the cedar) and this worked very well. The headboard is 6′ tall and over 6′ wide. The step down design pattern at the top is borrowed from the interior of the house where that pattern is repeated along the balcony to the master bedroom where the bed is freestanding in the middle of the large space. 
The tall headboard acts as a bit of a room divider as well, with the foot board low to allow the view out the windows. I also got a new toy just before I built this bed, a Festool Domino Joiner (check out Lee Valley for their line of Festool tools). I used the joiner for all the mortise and tenon joints. It is exceptional, you make a mortise with the machine in each piece of wood you are to join, then glue in a floating tenon. It is the perfect tool for furniture, doors and windows, etc. The pine sits into a dado groove at the top and bottom of each rail and floats. It was a lot of work to assemble all the pieces in the head board, getting each to fit well with the hand split red cedar. All the red cedar wood is hand split and sanded. I used Lee Valley bed hardware to make it easy to assemble and take apart. The bed is finished with Landark natural oil (tung oil, linseed oil, pine rosin, citrus and beeswax). A fun project, thank you Darlene and Michael!
