pet crafts – diy midcentury pet bed

While I do admit that most of my 2013 goals and Pinterest resolutions were a bust, I did finish one. Well, at least part of one. I’ve been plotting making a piece for the house with hair pin legs since I found hairpinlegs.com. I bought some forever ago and they sat there taunting me. What better way to put them to use than a DIY midcentury pet bed for those ratty, I mean stylish, little mutts of mine.

Sadly, I lost the memory card that had the photos while I put this together but it was nothing fancy. I cut down some leftover 5/8″ plywood for the base to 25″ x 25″ and used some scrap 1 x 4s to form the edge around three sides. I purposely left the front edge a little lower using a 1 x 2 so it would be easy to get into. I was able to use my Kreg Jig, Jr that I got at Haven so there are no visible screws. So handy and fancy!  Since I didn’t paint the bottom of the bed, I screwed in the hairpin legs. Here are few crappy shots from my iPhone. Lemur clearly believes the bed is for her.

I just lightly sanded, primed, and painted it a satin white. After screwing in the hairpin legs, I had myself a fancy dog bed. Except there was no pillow. As much as I practice, I’m still much more comfortable cutting wood than I am cutting fabric. At first I couldn’t find the right pillow form so I tried to make one by making a Frankenstein pillow from two cheap bed pillows from Target. That was a disaster in every way and form. So I just threw a regular pillow on there and put a throw over it. It sat like that for months. No pictures of that embarrassment. It is quite shameful.

Thankfully, just after Christmas, I scored the perfect sized pillow form at Joann’s. And after a bit of pep-talk, I finally felt confident enough to cut the fabric. I used the same envelope pillow case tutorial I used here, and ended up with something much more respectable looking. It is not perfect but thankfully you can’t see it and the creatures don’t know any better.

The kids love their DIY midcentury pet bed. It was initially intended to be for the dogs but Lemur has claimed it as hers.

Cats are jerks. If you don’t believe me, please enjoy this video, which I watch every time I need to laugh. My mutts have fallen victims to the bed stealing cats as well.

[youtube_video] G2vfq-KTx8Q [/youtube_video]

So while it was technically finished in 2014, at least I finished one of my Pinterest Resolutions! Now that I’m backing to making some small furniture pieces, I’m excited to tackle some more. 

Linking to:  Remodelaholic