We moved into a little town house with plenty of space, enough to have a guest room, which is great, but we still need room for activities. So I set to designing a simple, inexpensive, and versatile solution for the guest bed - a wall bed, aka Murphy Bed.
I started the design with the assumption that lumber prices are still lofty on some of the more desirable products, so this needed to be material efficient, but that I also simply didn't want to spend a lot of money. I bought two pieces of 3/4" poplar plywood, and had them rip each one to 29" before I left the store. Normally with poplar, I'd try my best to find as much green on the ply as I could, but not a single damn sheet had any character. Oh well, I'm not sleeping on it.
While I was there, I picked up a couple 2x4 premium studs, and some 1x8 utility boards, which comes in 8ft lengths. Utility boards are usually pine, and usually crap. They are not kiln dried, usually still a bit green, and they basically fresh off the mill, butt they are around $5. So if you can sift through and find the better boards that are dry and straight, with a few passes on the planer, they are indistinguishable from their much more expensive cousins in the finished wood section.
I already had some hinges and hardware at home, so I took all this stuff back to the shop and started to process everything. I took one of the left over pieces of plywood and ripped two 7"x8ft sections to serve as the sides, and then started to mark out where I wanted each joint, then made sure both boards were mirrored versions of one another.
It's worth noting here, that the design of this is specific to the prime intentions being cost effective and material efficient. To wit, the overall box that mounts to the wall has only minor structural integrity until it has been mounted to the aforementioned wall. To make matters even more challenging, the total dimensions of the structure when folded up would be 7"x60"x91", which would have been far too large to fit up the stairs - so each piece of this had to be cut, sanded and finished before being assembled up in the guest room.
To make the mattress base, the part that folds down, I took those two pieces of 29" plywood, and joined them together with a bunch of biscuit joints and wood glue, we then began to mount the french cleats along the top side of this large panel.
The utility boards got planed and sanded, some became material for the box shelves, and some got ripped into french cleats.
My better half decided on the sealant color and finish, and we set to making sure every part was sealed properly. We ended up using White Wash Gel Wax finish. The rest of the trim got mounted onto the mattress base, and then sanded, before finally being sealed.
We got all of the pieces laid out in the room as we started to assemble. A lot of care had to be taken to make sure everything was square and lining up during assembly. So once we got the main box aligned with the wall, we centered it over three studs, and only screwed in the center in case we had to pitch it in side to side.
The overall goal is that the top boards of the mattress base, as well as two of the wall mounting boards for the box, were all ripped with a 45d cut to make french cleats. When not in use, the wall bed's box shelves would hang from the cleats, providing many a place for my dear wife adorn in knick-knacks; when in use, four of those boxes would be set out on the floor, supporting the weight of the bed, and the other two would hang on the wall, serving as storage for our guests.
We mounted the mattress base with four large hinges, one screw each to start, just to check fitment. Much to our relief, the main box only needed nudged ever so slightly for the base to fold up beautifully with an even 1/8" gap all the way around.
Once we finished mounting it up, we tested it out with the mattress, which was unfortunately a bit larger than a queen (the sizing I used for the design). We figured the mattress was just foam underneath the cover, so we unzipped it, trimmed it down, and now it fits snug as a bug.
With the boxes properly spaced underneath, the bed is quite comfy and solid feeling. I finished up the folding portion by installing two simple sliding latches to lock it in the folded position. We're gonna be giving it a test run with a guest very soon, after which we'll ponder some modifications and additions!
Our total cost for this project was just under $220, and it took us the weekend to build!
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