Hello, my name is Steve and I own a house close to the beach in Galveston Tx. For most of the time that I owned it, it was used for resort rental while I lived and worked in Arlington Va. It is a small (900 sqft) home with only two bedrooms, two baths, and a great room that occupies half of the square footage of the home to include the living, dining, and kitchen areas. Now that I am retired, my SO and I are moving from Arlington and will spend up to six months living in Texas and the other six months in California at a location that is still to be determined. Because we needed to create an office somewhere, I decided to take the spare bedroom at the Texas home and build a Murphy Bed (MB) and convert the spare bedroom to a dual use area. The following is an almost day-to-day chronicle of building the bed.
For starters, I purchase the Create A Bed Standard Murphy Bed Kit (http://www.wallbed.com/standard_kit.html) as it is a good quality product that had clear instructions on how to build the bed, included with the kit is a step by step DVD. If I had it to do all over again though, I would have chosen the Deluxe version of their kit for reasons I'll discuss later. One of the issues that I could foresee, was the requirement that two people are required for some aspects of the assembly of the bed. I did not have that option, so I used some other methods that helped me during those "two people required" activities and single-handedly constructed the bed.
BTW, I am not an accomplished woodworker. I was a program manager for a large IT project in DC and 30 years ago, a Chrysler line mechanic. Most of my woodworking skills were small home remodeling projects for which I love doing the "major stuff"like tearing out and rebuilding walls, plumbing, etc., and tended to procrastinate on the "finishing detail" stuff like painting and trimming.
Day 1 (Friday 9/27):
Here's a shot of the bedroom before I moved the old bed out. The Murphy Bed (MB) will sit on the wall where the current bed is. The dog (Lexi) and the cat (Pyewacket) currently installed on the old bed will be transferred to the MB once built. Laying on the bed besides the pets, is the box the MB hardware came in. The hardware kit is about $300+ and I probably spent another $400 in wood, screws, and other material.
I plan to build the MB using my radial arm saw, rip saw, jig saw, Kreg saw guide, Kreg Jig, various clamps, and the usual suspects of screwdrivers, hammers, vise-grips, squares, etc. Among my wood products I chose Arauco (yeah I never heard of it either!!) for the 4x8 plywood pieces as I was planning to paint it vice staining. It was quite a bit cheaper than Birch or Oak.
Day 2 (Saturday 9/28):
Following the excellent instructions that came with the kit, I was ready to cut my first pieces, the cross struts for the inner bed frame. In all I cut 12 boards to size - 10 for the cross struts and two for the frame sides. Because I am old school, I used my radial arm saw instead of a miter saw. Either one would work fine to cut this stuff though.
I had to make five struts which meant glueing and then fastening with screws, two boards to make one strut.
End view of the assembled struts
Day 3 (Sunday 9/29):
Repurposed my picnic table benches to assist in assembling the inner wood frame.
Here is the completed inner wood frame. Note the clamps used to try to maintain the squareness of the frame during assembly.
Day 4 and 5 (Monday & Tuesday 9/30-10/1):
Because I was doing my cuts under the house (its on stilts) I could not work as it rained both days. The covered bundle at the bottom of the picture contains my plywood for the bed. It was laying on the slab and remained remarkably dry.
Day 6 (Wednesday 10/2):
I did all of my plywood cuts in one shot. If I was to do it again, I would wait on cutting any of the header pieces (cabinet header, not the bed frame header) and the headboard piece due to the fact that once the bed frame is finished it could be off plus or minus, which would affect the fit and finish of the final product. Mine as it turned out was off a little but not too noticeable. I could have adjusted my header and headboard to compensate for this had I held off on those cuts.
Day 7 (Thursday 10/3): Errands. Sorry, no pictures of me going to get gas, food, and other items.
Day 8 (Friday 10/4):
Installed Melamine Tape on edges of bed rails plus header and footer and then sanded all. There are quite a few YouTube videos on how to install this tape using a laundry iron and is quite easy. The tape hides the various plies of wood on the edges of the plywood. Once on the board, I used a double side trimmer (Timberline 3400 Double Edge Laminate/Veneer Trimmer) to trim up the Melamine. This was a pretty quick operation. Note in the pictures below, my blue masking tape that identifies the piece I am working on.
Mounted hardware (pivot points, no pics) and then laid down some heavy paper on the floor in the bedroom. Carried the picnic table benches upstairs to the bedroom. Laid the Inner Wood Frame across the benches and rested the Bed frame rails on top. Pyewacket performed an inspection and gave me the approval to proceed with assembly tomorrow.
Day 9 (Saturday 10/5):
Assembled the right rail side, to the inner wood frame. Note the hardware (black items) on the side rail. These are for the pivot with the upright cabinet and where the gas-charged cylinder attaches to the bed frame. There is one that is installed on the left side as well. BTW, it is critical that these are installed in the exact location called out in the specs. While I was installing the gas-charged cylinder bracket on the left rail, I missed it by a measly ⅛" from where it was supposed to be. This was enough to screw up the process of installing the gas-charged cylinder for the left side.
Day 10 (Sunday 10/6):
Sanded and beveled edges for the legs.
Day 11 (Monday 10/7):
Assembled upper cabinet header. Note the pocket holes I drilled using the Kreg Jig vice what the instructions wanted me to do which was to nail that piece on. As I said though I would have held off cutting the wood for this until after I had built and performed a final measurement of the bed frame.
Prepped the face panels. Sanded, installed Melamine tape to edges, cut out holes for the legs.
Attached the face panels to the wood frame. This is one of those areas where two people would be handy. What I did was I laid the bed frame down onto the face panels. Got everything lined up, and then penciled a mark around the strut onto the face boards. I then lifted the bed frame back up, put my construction adhesive on the bed struts as per the instructions and then lowered the bed frame back down onto the face panels paying attention to my pencil marks. It was then just a matter of drilling pilot holes and screwing the struts to the face boards according to the instructions.
Day 12 (Tuesday 10/8):
Today I started off by drying my instruction manual, which was blown into Lexi's pool during the night by those notable gulf breezes. Luckily when I got the manuals (there are three of them, one for plywood assemble, one for if you are using particle board, and then a final assembly book), I had scanned them in to my computer and had an electronic copy to refer to.
While the instructions were drying, I put Melamine Tape on the rest of the panels and sanded everything down.
I then laid out all of the pieces and started to paint the legs, headboard...
I also painted the inside and outside of the bed frame minus the face panel.
Day 13 (Wednesday 10/9):
Finished painting all components. Installed most loose hardware to the verticals. Brought pieces up to bedroom to start assembly tomorrow.
Day 14 (Thursday 10/10):
I installed the handles to the legs and although I don't like them very much, they were about the only ones that Home Depot had and as former Secretary Rumsfeld said "you go to war with the Army you have --- not the Army you want", so I used them. I installed the legs to the bed frame and note the hinge and how it sticks inside of the face panel. The inside needs to attach to the wood frame strut so that is why it was critical to position the strut properly and to cut the holes out properly in the face panel.
Installed the latches that lock the bed in the upright position. You can barely make them out, but if you look at the upper frame strut, you can see where I drilled out the holes for the latches. Also in this picture you have a pretty good view of how the leg hinges attach to the second bed frame strut.
Both legs and pull handles installed on the bed frame assembly. As it stands, the bed footer is towards the top, and the bed header is towards the floor. The outer cabinet has not been installed yet. Note the blue masking tape on the wall. The upper piece of tape denotes the middle point of my wall as I wanted to put the bed in the center of the wall. The lower pieces were supposed to mark where the studs are in the wall, but were actually off and I had to use the ol' drill and hunt mode when it came time to bolt the cabinet to the wall (later in the process). BTW, think I had dirt on my camera lens so that is what you are seeing and not a bad paint job.
I have installed both verticals to the bed frame. and am getting ready to install the headboard. Several things about this picture. First, the orientation of this picture shows the bed frame with the head portion of it close to the wall. I laid the bed frame assembly down on two 4x4s positioned under the face panel towards the bed header to lift it up off of the floor. Doing this aided me in installing the verticals effortlessly, and also gave me clearance between the bed frame and the floor to allow the verticals to pivot upright. Remember, I was doing this by myself and this is one of the operations that required two people. If I had it to do over again, I probably would have stacked another 2x4 on top of the 4x4s to give me a little more clearance because as I was pivoting the verticals up, they did hit the floor but not enough to impede progress. But before I could pivot the verticals, I had to install the headboard. Here I deviated from the instructions of running two screws through the verticals into the headboard. I got out my Kreg Jig and put in five screws into each vertical. This added quite a bit of strength and aided me in pivoting the verticals to their upright position. One last thing about this picture is that I also used a couple of 1x2s for the bed frame footer to hold it off of the floor. I did this to allow me to pick up the very heavy bed frame by giving me a grip under the face panel.
Shows the cabinet verticals upright and attached to the bed frame. Note the headboard attached. The two boards in the picture that emanate from the bed frame to the verticals don't belong to anything.
Shows the gas charge cylinders installed. I was able to put the right side on with no problem. The left side though was ⅛" off where the cylinder was longer than my pivot points. Because these are under high pressure, you cannot compress them by hand, or at least I couldn't so here's what I did, with the bed folded up into the cabinet, which is the position it has to be in to install the cylinders, I hooked the upper part of the cylinder to its attachment point in the cabinet. The lower part of the cylinder hung down towards the floor about an ⅛" too long for the attachment point. I was able to grab a medium size pry bar and position it between the end of the cylinder and the floor. Then it was a matter of physics and leverage to pop it on to the attachment. BTW, the bed operates normally and I can't tell of any impacts caused by having it ⅛" off. This picture also shows the cabinet header installed.
Note the weight at the bed frame footer. Once the cylinders are installed, the bed frame has a propensity to fold up into the cabinet. Again, this is another two person operations. I overcame this by putting my air compressor and a couple of tool boxes on the bed while I installed the inner mattress support and mattress straps. Providing the mattress is heavy enough (and mine was), it will hold the bed frame to the floor without the assistance of tools and such.
Picture of the (almost) finished cabinet. It is operational and folds up and down effortlessly.
And here it is down, complete with the dog and cat accessories.
After laying off for about a week, I installed the LED reading light. This was an LED strip I found at Lowes and I was able to peel and stick it onto the headboard. I wanted the light to shine up and bounce off of the cap to provide indirect lighting to the bed as opposed to light kits installed in the cabinet header that shine down onto the bed. Nothing worse than trying to read a book with a light shining directly at you. BTW, I'm a guy and that's the best I can make up a bed.
If you read the lead-in into this effort, you read that I don't like detail stuff, which includes trim. But I knew it was kind of plain looking and needed something. Because there are a lot of pictures of Murphy Beds out on the internet, I got all kinds of ideas on trimming, but the one I like the best was this person who used flat trim and decked her MB out to look like a series of doors and drawers so I took her idea and ran with it. First off she poly coated her whole MB (and it looked very beautiful) where I painted mine, but I though the contrast between the paint and the poly coated trim looked great so that's what I did. I found the trim at Lowes. It was tongue and groove pine wall paneling, about 4” width and ¼” depth. I trimmed it down to 3” widths. After the trim went on, I poly coated it with Miniwax.
Finally, I added the final cabinet hardware (knobs).
And it is done.
Murphy Bed Lessons Learned
1. Cut the headboard and cap (header) pieces after the bed frame is assembled and measured against the specs. You may need to adjust the cap and headboard widths to accommodate for any deviations in the bed frame size.
2. Try to keep the bed frame square during assembly
3. Make sure you get the gas cylinder attachments exactly where the specs say to put them. I was off by ⅛” on one side causing the gas cylinder to be ⅛” too long. You cannot collapse them by hand. I ended up attaching the upper nipple first, and then using a pry bar to collapse the cylinder to fit the bottom nipple. It wasn’t pretty, but was effective.
4. It is recommended that two people are needed for some of the bed assembly activities:
A. As I was only one, I decided to assemble the bed in the room it was going into.
B. I laid down heavy paper onto the floor.
C. When I assembled the bed frame to the face panels, I laid the face panels on the floor and had the bed frame up against the wall. I lowered the bed frame onto the face panels and got it lined up temporarily. I took a pencil and ran it around the bed frame supports to give me an idea where it would have to land when I did the permanent assembly. I then raised the bed frame against the wall, put my construction adhesive on and then lowered it back down onto the face panels. A quick visual told me I had it in the right spot and I could start screwing them together.
D. I put 4x4s under the face panel at the head end of the bed frame to raise the face panel at the head (closest to the wall) of the bed. This helped me to put on the verticals on with very little trouble (even better if you add a 2x4 to the 4x4 to get the face panel a little higher). BTW, a couple of 1x2” boards at the top of the bed frame helped me to lift it up when I needed to else the bed is heavy at this point and tough to get a grip on it to lift up. As I had Kreg jointed the headboard with five screws per side, the verticals were strong enough to lift up gingerly on one side and causing the opposite vertical lagging but raising as well. To help in this operation you may want to have a long 1x2 to push against the headboard on the other vertical.
E. Once attached to the wall and you pull the bed down to its horizontal position, make sure you have plenty of heavy objects to put on the foot of the bed to hold it down. Also when ready to put the mattress on, I moved it partially onto the bed and removed the weight one by one to keep the bed from going back into the wall.
F. I clamped a board on each side to help me set the cabinet header on the verticals. It rested on the clamped boards long enough for me to clamp it to the verticals and then I removed the clamped boards. Once I got the header adjusted to where I wanted it, I screwed it to the verticals and then removed the clamps
5. Tools:
A. Recommend Kreg Jointing all corners to reduce the number of visible screws.
B. If you don’t have a table saw but do have a rip saw, I found the Kreg saw guide worked great, or use a straight edge.
C. Clamps are something I just couldn’t get enough of so have plenty of clamps.
D. A Melamine trimmer (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000P4UPHO/ref=oh_details_o00_s01_i01?ie=UTF8&psc=1) was a huge time saver.
E. Buy an old iron to install the Melamine instead of ruining your good Iron.
6. Label all boards with masking tape and a Sharpie so you don’t grab the wrong one
7. To reduce the chance of sawing the holes in the face panels for the legs wrong, I would buy the Create a Bed Deluxe kit that has the one piece tube leg that fold over into the bed. Should reduce a lot of work and give you more options on trimming out the face panel
Summary
Well, this is how I built a Create A Bed Murphy Bed by myself. I hope it helps you in building yours whether you are doing it by yourself or have a few friends over. I hope you enjoyed this narrative and I look forward to phase II of this project, which is to build wardrobes and bookcases tied in with the Murphy Bed.
Thanks for viewing!
