How to Design Your Own Captain's Bed

Choose a wood type and color for your captain’s bed. If you start with unpainted wood and apply stain or varnish, the choices are many, including mahogany, maple, white or light oak.

Select the type of drawer pull you will use on your captain’s bed. Your choices include handles, knobs or grooves in the drawer fronts. Drawer pulls come in different finishes, including silver, brass, wood and porcelain.

Decide if your captain’s bed will have a headboard and footboard or one of the two. This decision affects your measurements since you must either attach the headboard and footboard to the wood bed frame or make it an integrated part of the frame.

Plan the number of drawers for your bed. You might choose two large side-by-side drawers or three smaller drawers.

Write out the measurements for the captain’s bed. Measurements include the width and length of the bed based on the size of a twin bed mattress and box spring, the height of the captain’s bed frame from the floor to the top of the wood frame that holds the bedding and drawers, and the depth of the drawers. Your measurements should also include space at the bottom of the wood frame to accommodate the drawers to rest above the floor.

Plan for a platform that will support the bedding to sit on top of or inside of the wood bed frame. This decision determines the platform measurements and also the hardware and parts you will need to secure the platform.