Building a Murphy Bed
This Murphy wall bed was the perfect replacement for an old futon sleeper couch in the basement. It folds down to provide a comfortable queen-sized bed for the occasional house guest and when not in use, it folds up against the wall to form a handsome cherry cabinet. And the cabinet only projects out from the wall about 16", leaving plenty of floor space for other pursuits (like ping-pong).
The bed uses a piston assist lift mechanism from Create-a-Bed that greatly eases the task of lifting the bed to the upright position. The Create-a-Bed kit includes all the required bed hardware plus a DVD and plans that take you through all the steps of creating the basic bed frame and bed cabinet. The creative part is customizing the cabinet to fit the look and feel of your room. In this case, the cabinet was made to match a cherry entertainment center. The design elements include a reddish-brown finish, fluted corner uprights, and 2-3/4" cove molding across the top. The cabinet also has base molding with a small radius cove along the top outer edge.
Dimensions
Main cabinet: 90-5/8" wide, 67-1/2" high, 16-1/4" deep
Cabinet top:
95" wide, 18-1/2" deep
Bed frame panel: 82-1/4" wide, 61-3/4" high
Bed frame (inner):
60-5/8" x 80-1/2"
The queen-sized mattress lies on a rock-solid support structure that begins with a 3/4" cherry plywood panel. It is made by gluing together two pieces of plywood that are 41" wide. The 6" wide solid cherry bed rails are glued to the outer perimeter of this panel and a framework of 1-1/2" wide poplar struts are glued and screwed along the edges of the rails and across the width of the cherry panel. A double strut is used in the center to strengthen the interior area of the frame and to provide additional support where the two panel pieces are glued together. A piece of 1/4" thick plywood sits atop the poplar framework. For extra torsion box strength, this piece could also be attached to the framework but I didn't find this to be necessary.
Unlike conventional beds that are designed to be disassembled for moving, the bed frame on this Murphy bed is glued and screwed together, resulting in an exceptionally solid frame that can withstand years of use. Although not visible in the photos, the bed frame folds up and down thanks to heavy-duty pivot plates attached to the inside of the cabinet.
A small rectangular opening is cut into the exterior panel to accommodate the locking mechanism of the fold-down legs. The legs work surprisingly well and don't have any wobble to them (I had my misgivings when I first looked at the plans). When the legs are flipped out from the panel, they also release the latches that lock the bed in its closed position.
Assembling the bed frame posed a bit of a challenge because it was big and unwieldy. I found it easier to assemble with the frame oriented vertically rather than horizontally. The two pieces of plywood that formed the frame panel were glued together using extra long pipe clamps formed by connecting two smaller pipe clamps with sleeves. A slightly different approach was used for attaching edging strips to the plywood. For this, a piece of wood was clamped across the panel a few feet from the end and then a series of small pipe clamps were used to clamp the edging with the cross piece serving as a clamp brace. The whole bed frame assembly (rails + struts) was glued to the panel with construction adhesive.
