[BigV]

pic01--
glatt, you asked what holds the mattress up. The answer is the mattress (when there is one) is held up by these platforms. I took fairly thin walled poles and split them into strips about an inch wide, lots of them. Then I took another medium sized pole and split it into halves. I then sewed the strips onto the half poles with the green line you see here. I left the half poles a little long, and I staggered the distance between them so the top surface of strips could meet flush, making a nice platform for the mattress.

If you look carefully at the upper left hand corner of this picture, you can see where I notched the platform to fit around the pole. And on the right hand side of the picture you can see how the far side of the platform half is cut straight, but the near side has each split rounded off.

What you can't really see in this picture is the three long thick walled poles that run the length of the bed spaced evenly between the posts and stretchers upon which the platforms rest. You can see the ends of two of these poles at the far left of the picture, and now that you see those, you can kind of see the poles through the very narrow gaps between the splits.

pic02--
Here is T testing out the platform. It turns out we had them mismatched. If you look at the outboard edge, you see there's a big difference in the length of the rounded ends. The shorter one belongs on the bottom and it has a matching half. The longer pair go on top. The shorter ones go on the bottom because it's possible to sit on the edge of the bed and the longer ones would poke you in the back of the legs. Naturally, this isn't a problem for the top platform. T's Mom supervised happily.