I am not a handy­man, but I have learned a lot through obser­va­tion. My father is very handy with his tools and some of his abil­ity to ima­gine and cre­ate must have been trans­ferred by watch­ing him all those count­less hours improv­ing our home. I am build­ing a dun­geon in the base­ment. I need a plat­form which I can use to keep my slave off the cold con­crete floor, the plat­form will also give me the abil­ity to attach hooks and other things.

Build­ing this was fairly easy and while this only cov­ers the basic build­ing pro­cess I need to warn the DIY police out there. This pro­ject was never meant to pro­duce a per­fectly angled and flattened plat­form. It must fit the theme of my dun­geon and as such it has to be safe and func­tional, no more.

I bout myself some wooden bars, 8 foot long, 2 inches thick and 4 inches wide. The look like this:

I bought seven of these, four for the frame and three to rein­force the frame and ensure that the boards do not bend under weight.

You will need some hard­ware, I choose some 90 degree angles which are com­mon for build­ing decks, small screws to afix those angles and longer screws to secure the frame and the boards onto the frame.

I bought 16 angles and a pack­age of 100 screws of each size. To actu­ally cover the frame I bought ten boards sized 8 feet by 10 inches wide and 2 inches thick. Then I had one board cut to be 6.65 inches wide to account for the frame.
The base boards are thick enough so that I can attach hooks and screw other things into them to securely.

The frame is eas­ily built, make sure the four angles are securely set on the inside before you secure them with two long screws. The inside of the frame should look some­what like this:
I chose to not sink the screws com­pletely and you can choose to use more screws, for me this was enough to retain struc­tural integ­rity, espe­cially once the sup­port bars go into the frame. I then pro­ceeded to secure the frame from the out­side.
After doing all four sides and ensur­ing that the frame is not skewed, work diag­onal corners when you secure the frame, I ended up with this:

The simple frame is then rein­forced with the remain­ing three wood bars. The angles are used on both sides of the bar to cre­ate a firm lock against the inside of the frame. This ensures the frame is struc­tur­ally sound and the boards can rest evenly on the frame.
The base boards are then screwed at the very out­side and on the middle bar of the frame. Because I chose to use con­struc­tion wood the boards actu­ally do not align per­fectly with the frame even though both of them are eight feet long. Each board needs to be adjus­ted and then screwed down.

I decided to leave the last board open with six hinges you would usu­ally use for a Util­it­ies door. Those six hinges are moun­ted so that the last board opens up. This allows e to put hard­ware or other things into the frame. The next two pic­tures show the plat­form open and closed.

The base plat­form is done, it is fairly flat and very sturdy. The weight of the frame com­bined with the boards also ensures that the plat­form stays in place. The next steps are to sand the man sur­face with a belt sander and then stain the wood. I will post the updates on this pro­cess as I am get­ting closer to com­plet­ing them.

Please do leave your com­ments as to what I should be put­ting on the plat­form once I am done with it.