In which I build a bed: Part 1

So, I am a restless sleeper.  Evidently, I spend the whole night kicking the crap out of the bed for wrongs it never committed.  The Wife is a poor sleeper, which means every time I kick, she wakes up, and this is bad for everyone.   Let me just say that we spend a lot of time sleeping on the couch.

We knew this, so when we moved in together, we spent a great deal of time searching for a mattress that minimized what those in the mattress industry call "motion transfer."  We settled on a Naturally Bob's bed from Bob's Discount furniture.  Despite this, I continue to kick, she continues to be sleep deprived, and we both continue to be miserable.  Did Bob swindle us?

One day when we were particularly fed up, I decided to pay attention to the motion.  I realized that the motion that was being transfers wasn't an undulating vertical wave through the mattress, the bed was moving horizontally, head to toe.  If you look at the legs, on the bed frame, you can see that the support is much less stiff head to toe practically forming a flexure joint.

Experiment:  Lift up mattress, Box Spring, remove bed frame, put boxspring on floor. => Success!  No more motion transfer!  It's not Bob's fault!

The problem is, of course, the wife doesn't like the bed eight inches lower than it is supposed to be so we need a new solution.  We wanted to stay away from metal bed frames so we wouldn't have the same problem, but the platform beds we found were expensive and generally didn't have under bed space.  And thus, old, unqualified me started postulating how to build a bed.

Requirements:
1.  Queen size with split box spring
2.  No motion transfer
3.  Not visible under bedskirt
4.  Underbed storage for the plastic containers we use
5.  Able to attach our current headboard

I started thinking about platform beds, but plywood is so expensive and difficult to work with if you don't have a panel saw.  Plus, I thought it would bow under the weight if I didn't reinforce it along the edge (which would eliminate under-bed space)  Then I realized, only the legs are bad on this metal frame.  Maybe I could use pieces of it as the edge and build the actual support structure out of wood.  As a bonus we could use the same headboard attachment points as the old bed, since they would still be intact.

And now an unqualified plan is forming.  We start in the next post.