The Brunswick Patchwork Bed Bed Project Part III: The Bed Map

As I was building my Brunswick Patchwork Bed Bed, I became very interested in the origin of the wood I was collecting - or at least its previous life. During hard rubbish collection week (and afterward), I was constantly on the lookout for certain lengths, thicknesses and types of wood. Sometimes I would see a pile of wood that wasn't quite right, or a part of a discarded bed that looked too good for me to cut up and rearrange, if someone else might use it as is. Sometimes I saw pieces I wanted, but wasn't able to take home on my bicycle. (Although I sure tried! I managed to take home more than I would have expected on my bike, including the boards for the long sides of the bed frame.)

I ended up with a mental map of my neighbourhood, marked out by landmark piles of broken furniture - first made up of locations I intended to return to, and eventually including all the locations I had taken wood from. In recreating a bed out of discarded beds and other discarded wood, I was reassembling the rubbish of Brunswick into one cohesive piece of furniture, folding that mental map of the locations of other people's rubbish into a new object in a single location. (Incidentally, all of those broken and discarded objects would have ended up in one location if I hadn't picked them up, and I felt there was a kind of symmetry in bringing them together in my house instead of in landfill.)

It became very important to me along the way that the materials had been harvested directly from my neighbourhood, and I wanted to preserve that mental map in some way. I also wanted to learn a little about using Google Sketchup, the free, open source 3D modelling program which Ana White uses to write up her free furniture plans. As a result I penciled in a location on the end of each piece of wood, and kept a series of constantly changing sketches of where each piece would fit. When I finished each section, and after watching some online tutorials, I drew up a model in Google Sketchup.

And here is the bed map, a three-dimensional model of the bed, showing where each piece of reclaimed wood was found. The only pieces that are not labelled are those that I had to buy for the trim of the bed frame and the vertical boards of the headboard, the offcuts of which are used in the headboard's patchwork panel.