Spare Bedroom Wall Bed

Wall Bed

Idea spawned from Handyman Magazine. Long before Brother was born, the family had a dilemma. We wanted to give the kids each a bedroom and so we had three bedrooms but had four functions that needed to be retained and that meant two rooms had to be combined, namely the tertiary rooms, home office and guest bedroom. The room is very small, 110 sq ft, especially for a full bed and office furniture and thus this project was started not to create a room design but truthfully, to solve a floor constraint problem. The office minimum space is roughly 36 sq ft and the spare bedroom minimum space would be roughly 72 sq ft and the chance that both functions are required at the same time is close to never. With mom’s parents soon needing a place to stay, dad made the wall bed a top priority.

Project Design

The best wall in the room to build up wall cabinets (since the wall bed will appear to look like a cabinet) was the north wall. The bed would extend along the short dimension and allow space for the office furniture to share half the room. Dad wanted the bed to appear like a very large cabinet and found the 4 panel hidden TV cabinet design the least conspicuous. The front facade was dry fitted with 1/8th inch oak pieces and then face glued directly to two sheets of oak plywood, the rest of the design was unmodified from the plans that came with the wall bed hardware. For the guests’ convenience, dimmable lights were installed above the headboard with a capacitive knob to control the brightness by touch.

Side bookcases

The side bookcases were built a year later. It’s a shallow bookcase with a cabinet on the bottom, a slide out for guest’s personal items, and a tall open shelf design.

Cost Tracker