Then, I applied wood glue into the holes and inserted the dowels. So these ended up being about 15 15/16” long. NOTE: The dowels were exactly 48” long, so in order to get three equal length dowels from each piece, I had to cut them SLIGHTLY under 16” to account for the blade kerf when making the cuts. Then, I sanded these pieces really well, and cut my dowels to roughly 16” long. Once all the holes were drilled, I pulled out my pocket hole jig and drilled 1 ½″ pocket holes into the ends of the 2×4 and one on each end across the top side of the 2×2 piece.

You could use a stop collar to be extra precise if you wanted, but it’s not super critical as long as you are pretty consistent. I drilled until the cutter head was flush with the top of the board for each hole (it was about ⅜″ deep).

Once all my dowel locations were marked, I used a ¾” forstener bit to drill out each location. I clamped the top and bottom pieces together and transferred the marks to each piece so they’d match perfectly. Then, I set my Multi-Mark to 4 ¼” and made several marks out from this center point down the length of the boards all 4 ¼” apart. NOTE: For each side panel of this bed, to make things easier, I used an odd number of dowels so that I could start in the center and go out from there marking where my dowels would go. Then, I marked the center (17 ½″ from each end). I set it to mark ¾” offset and drew a line down the middle of each of these pieces on the narrow side.

I used this handy Kreg Multi-Mark tool for making most of my marks. Prefer to print? Grab the printable building plans here! I began assembling the side panels first by cutting a piece of 2×2 and a piece of 2×4 to 35″ long for the top and bottom (You need one of each PER SIDE, so two of each total).

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