Design Lessons from DIY

Recently I had the wonderful experience designing several pieces of furniture for a very important  client--my wife. She likes handmade gifts, and I’m an engineer who does woodwork as a hobby. As we  were engaged and planning what we needed for our new house, I happily volunteered to build a bed  frame. It seemed like a pretty straightforward solution- I could build a custom bed frame exactly the way she wanted.  

However, we quickly learned that there was a language barrier between us. I realized that communicating about project requirements, results, and timelines with those outside my field was very different from communicating with other engineers.  

Thankfully, my wife is a master communicator and we were able to work it out. In the end not only was I  able to build her a bed frame, a blanket chest, and some floating shelves, but I also learned three valuable lessons that are helpful to professional designers and DIYers alike.

Shelves designed to fit in the spaces between a painting and the edge of the wall

Lesson 1: Focus on the Important Information 

I spent hours researching different bed frames. I poured over different construction types, joinery  methods, styles, etc. When my then fiancee got home from work I excitedly showed her several videos,  notes, blueprints, and started talking about different ways I could make the bed. 

After listening to me ramble for about 10-15 minutes, she told me, “I just care that it looks good, is sturdy, and has drawers we can put our clothes in.” As an engineer I was interested in joinery methods, lumber  dimensions, and the types of tools I would need to use to put the bed together. My wife however was  focused on what really mattered: whether or not the bed frame fit our wants and needs.

Client time is valuable; wasting it on unnecessary details doesn’t help move the design forward. After the initial bed frame experience, I refined my questions for future  projects to focus on the most important criteria and I was able to quickly determine the best design to meet her expectations.

CAD model made to show the depth & width of drawers in a bed frame

Lesson 2: Showing is Better than Telling 

While deciding on how tall to make the bed frame and how deep to make the shelves we had a difficult time understanding what each other was saying. I was talking in inches and feet which meant little to my wife, and she was using qualitative phrases that were hard for me to visualize such as “tall enough to sit down on” or “wide enough to fit our clothes”.  

After going nowhere for a few minutes, I brought out a tape measure and asked her, “How tall do you want the bed?”. She raised her hand to a height and I measured it. I asked her how wide the drawers would need to be to fit our clothes. She spread her hands out and I measured it. When I finally got the bed assembled, sure enough, the bed was the perfect height, and our clothes fit perfectly. 

I learned that although my wife didn’t speak in feet and inches, she had amazing intuition about what size things needed to be. The blanket chest held our blankets and fit right beside our couch. The size and spacing of the shelves she gave me matched perfectly on our walls. The people we work with as engineers might not speak the same technical language, but they have background experience and ideas about what is needed. 

Showing methods such as sketches, CAD drawings, prototypes, or even showing dimensions with your  hands do a much better job at communicating ideas between the designer and client than words. 

The bed frame the day I told my wife it would be finished vs finished bed frame one and a half weeks later.

Lesson 3: Be Realistic about Timelines and Budgets 

When I decided to build our bed frame, I had the goal of having it a month before the  wedding so that my wife could stay in our apartment while I stayed with my aunt and uncle until we got married. I also had the goal of building the bed frame cheaper than purchasing one.

Those of you who have worked on DIY projects know that’s not how it goes. The project took much longer than expected and my wife had to sleep on a couch for two weeks. Also, I ended up needing to purchase tools and the bed frame ended up costing as much as buying it would have been. The results though were well worth the work. All of our furniture matches, fits perfectly in our apartment, and does exactly what we want it to do.

Every design process has its pros and cons. DIY projects offer complete customization at the cost of time spent. Being aware of the ins-and-outs of each option helps designers and clients work together to make the right decision for both parties. 

In the end, both my wife and I got what we wanted. She got custom furniture made with love and I had fun learning and building something with my hands. I was surprised at how valuable the DIY experience was as an engineer. I learned the importance of doing the proper research to  communicate realistic expectations, the value of giving myself more time than I think necessary, and the necessity of not sugar coating schedules to impress a client. Hopefully these lessons can save you the reader the trouble of learning them the hard way, but I encourage you to try some DIY and learn your own design lessons.