Build Your Own Fold Up Bed
Most of us can’t afford to devote an entire room to exclusive use as a guest bedroom. It’s simply too wasteful to let the room sit empty for 50 weeks or more out of the year, waiting idly for a guest to arrive.
Probably the most common solution to this problem is the convertible sofa.
It’s a good one, but because the sofa is often in the living room, you end up with a guest sleeping in the middle of your home. They don’t get any privacy, traffic patterns are usually disrupted and nobody is really comfortable.
A second, less common way to put up guests is on a foldaway bed. You can tuck one of these in a home office, den or playroom.
Most of the year, it’s out of sight and out of the way, freeing up floor space so you can put the room to good use on a daily basis. But when guests arrive, it folds down and goes to work. Thus your guests get a private room, your living room stays free and open and everyone is happier.
There are three ways you can get a foldaway bed. The simplest is to buy a complete unit, including bed, mattress and the cabinetry to conceal everything when the bed is in its stored position. One source for complete units is the Murphy Bed Company.
A second way to get your bed is to buy just the folding mechanism and build your own cabinet to go with it or have the job done for you by a custom cabinet maker. Murphy will sell you the hardware you need for this approach.
In either case, the mechanism is made in various sizes to accept the different standard mattress sizes. They are also spring loaded and adjustable so you can balance the bed for nearly effortless opera tion.
If you are adventurous, you can make a foldup bed from scratch. I have one in my home I built from plywood. I designed it to pivot on an axle made of iron pipe support ed by two wall cabinets that flank the bed. The bottom of the bed is covered with paneling so it looks good when closed and needs no doors to conceal it.
The bed works well, but it’s not quite perfect. Even though I made it as light as possible and poured a heavy concrete counterweight in the head end in an effort to balance it for easy operation, it’s still a bit heavy at the foot end, and requires some strength to open and close it.
Even so, I saved about $400 on the folding hardware by building it from scratch. If the need ever arose, I’d probably do it that way again.
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Tags: Add new tag, convertible sofa, fold up beds, foldaway bed, loft beds, Murphy Bed, murphy bed company, wall cabinets