Alternatives to bubinga

[FS7]

My youngest is quickly outgrowing her temporary toddler bed, and I figured it was a good time to make the final conversion from crib to full-size bed. It's been disassembled and sitting in the shop for a while.

For reference, here is (or was) the crib:



The plan is to do a platform/drawer bed, since you can never have enough storage and there's no real use for a box spring either. My design is my own, but here's something similar with a key difference:



With mine, the slats on the front will expose the "inside" of the bed. The only insides will probably be plywood and pine since none of it is visible in normal use (hidden either by the wall or by bedding). The lone exception is the cross member that serves as the the mounting point for the frontmost drawer slide. In my case, that will be about three inches or so behind the footboard, and partially visible from the front. The sides (drawer face frames, more or less) are 11 3/4" high, so if I were making a true "box" it would be about a 54" long by 11 3/4" board. The problem is that while I do have enough bubinga, I don't want to use what is other wise $90 or more of lumber on a board you won't really see. I am happy to have solid drawer fronts with nice-looking bubinga that I cannot possibly replace for anywhere near what I paid for the boards, but I think there are probably better alternatives here.

I don't have any great ideas, though. I have padauk, which when aged loses the orange color and looks a lot more like bubinga at least in color tone. I also don't care for it that much, so I wouldn't miss it. I have one jatoba board that matches well, but it's not enough and I don't have a great source for it locally. Most of the similar options are almost as expensive and would require a special trip, so I'm trying to avoid that. Any thoughts are welcome.

[MsNomer]

Making the bed will be much more comfortable if you have effectively a toe kick. It could have drawers.

[FS7]

From measuring other beds in the house the standard height seems to be about 16 inches, so there will be about 4.25" between the bottom of the drawers and the floor. Enough for little girls to lose things under.

[AHill]

Maybe osage orange. It ages to a deeper yellow. Very workable, and very stable. Cypress and jatoba (Brazilian Cherry) are two other alternatives. And, you can always choose a lighter colored wood e.g. maple and dye it orange.

[FS7]

As always, my shop is a mess. The board in question will be in the front, flush with the footboard side of the footboard drawer opening. This puts the front of the board about 2.25" behind the footboard slats, so still pretty visible. I don't want to count on a comforter blocking it. Top to bottom the height of the side rail / platform assembly is 11.75". Width is 53.75". So roughly 4.5 board feet, assuming I can find a pretty wide board like that. The bed isn't all one species, and because of an initial shortage of bubinga I did use bloodwood and walnut. Walnut that size is also expensive, as is bloodwood, and bloodwood in particular would be edge glued because it's nearly impossible to find bloodwood that wide. Bubinga veneer, to the extent flat sawn is even available, is also very expensive. I do have a good size bubinga veneer piece, but it's figured and not in good shape. So it would be a fair amount of work to get that to a nice usable state only to hide it "inside" a bed.

I'm probably overthinking this. I do have a nearly perfectly sized piece of African mahogany that in all likelihood will be good enough. Additionally, I don't use it that often and I probably paid around $4 per board foot for it.

[stav]

That’s a very nice looking bed. I can see why you are considering this piece of it so much. This may or may not work, but have you considered going with a lighter wood and painting it a dark color or maybe a stain that is similar to that of the rest of the bed? As you said, it will only be somewhat visible and it is hard to say how visible at this point once the mattress and bedding are on creating a dark area.

[FS7]

The maple dye idea made me think of that, yes. The African mahogany is a bit orange (and plain) but if I'm going to use that piece I have enough little scraps that I might try stain (or tinted Danish oil) to see how well it matches. I'm thinking the subtle darkening of dark walnut Danish oil might get me closer to the tone.

There are some samples online of Minwax stains on mahogany also.