We have always wanted a murphy bed in our guest room. We only get visitors about once a year and it just didn't make sense to have a room with a giant queen sized bed taking up most of the room and no one used it hardly! With a family of 7, we need all the space we can get!!
I had researched murphy beds throughout all these past years and to purchase one ready made ran anywhere from $1000-$3000!! Yikes!
So then I researched DIY murphy beds and I either didn't like the look of it (thought it looked cheap and like it belonged in a dorm room) or by the time you purchased the spring kit and everything it was gonna run almost $1000 anyway!
I finally found this blog post and was inspired! She made it seem manageable and my husband was on board!
So without further ado...how to make your own DIY Murphy Bed!!
We started by making the bed, measuring the mattress and figuring out how big of an area you need to hold the mattress.
Then you take that platform and use it to build the wall out, so to speak.
So my husband set the bed platform in between the new "walls" to make sure it fit without too big of a gap.
Then he built the bottom that the bed will actually sit on and the top frame.
So here is the bed just sitting on the base (not attached yet with the door hinges but just sitting on top of the base).
The next thing we did was build the shelves on either side of the bed.
From there comes the tedious finishing work. You have to put wood faces on everything.
As you can see, the top piece is basically a flap that will come down when bed is up for storage. When bed is ready to come down, you lift it up a few inches and pull the bed down and then let it flap back down.
When we pull the bed down, the legs (which are just a piece of wood, like a 2x6) swivel out and voila you have bed legs!
Now as you can see when the bed is down, this is what connects it to the base...heavy duty door hinges. We used 4 to be extra safe.
Now with using these door hinges, versus the expensive spring kits, it cuts back on the cost considerably (door hinges are like $3 or $4 each versus the spring kit which is like $300) but the full weight of the bed is not reduced at all so it's heavy pulling it down or putting it up...it's a 2 person job.
But as you can see there is storage space back behind where we store all the bedding for the bed.
When the bed is all closed up and not in use, we drilled a hole on each side to secure it completely...we used 6" bolts...
And that my friends is our DIY Murphy Bed. I hope you enjoy it and feel free to ask any questions!
