Bed Time

It may not come as much of a surprise to most of you, but if you want to live aboard then it's fairly sensible to have somewhere to sleep. One might even argue it's essential. Pretty much every boat has at least a bunk, many have small doubles, and some few even have proper sized double beds. Why should we be any different?

The "workshop".

Well, as always, it seems we had quite specific requirements for our bed. Firstly, having slept on a small 4' double, we knew we needed the comparative luxury afforded by a standard sized (5'6") double bed. The problem with a bed this size is that there isn't really space for anything else next to it once you put it into a box that's only 6' wide. As you do often need to move from one end of the boat to another then it's convenient to have a bit of space to be able to walk through, which is why a lot of boats compromise with a 4' double and a walkway down the side.

The top and bottom of the beefed up box.

Other sleeping solutions include multi-functioning furniture that converts into a sofa in the day and is made up into a bed at night. Whilst this might seem to offer the best of both worlds, anyone who actually uses this sort of bed soon tires of the hassle of making up the bed every time they want to get into it. No such thing at a quick nap in this case!

Uprights start to go on.

Fortunately for us we have planned to have our bedroom at the back of the boat (furthest from where people will enter at the front) and we don't really need to get into the back cabin that often as there is no exit to the outside at the back of the boat, so we needed a solution that would allow infrequent access through the space, but still leave us with a fully made up bed at the end of the day.

Braces ensure this box stays put!

We toyed with the idea of a bed on cables that would rise up to ceiling height to allow you to walk beneath. Alas however cool this would have been, I fear it would have been above even my skills. The solution we landed on was to have the whole bed on hinges to allow it to fold up against the wall. The bed would rest on two boxes that would support it along its length, with a walkway in between.

Aluminium is cut to length and laid out.

I decided to make the bed frame from aluminium angle, wrapped in a ply box to hold the mattress in place. The Aluminium was ordered from Berkshire Metals who are very helpful and accommodating, I would recommend them to anyone, and arrived the same day. I used my existing double mattress for measurements and came up with the following dimensions that would allow a little wiggle room inside the box: 1950x1400x250mm. The angle was duly cut to length by yours truly, drilled and fitted together. I made a little mistake when drilling the aluminium in not allowing for the thickness of the piece when sitting one inside the other, so a little fiddling was required to get the holes to line up nicely.

Night vision! No, just getting dark by the time I'd finished the box.

The boxes the bed is to sit on were constructed out of 2x2 timber, with one box being made a bit beefier than the other as this one would have to hold the weight of the whole bed when it was folded up. I made the boxes slightly longer than the bed to ensure both ends would be supported and as they fitted nicely in the space that way.

The frame site in its designated spot.

 The two boxes will provide storage as well as housing some of our electrical gubbins like the solar charger, inverter, and isolators. As you can only get into the top of one box we decided to house drawers under one box, whereas the other other one would have access through the top of the box.

The first drawer is finished.

As the 2x2 structure of the boxes isn't exactly aesthetically pleasing we wrapped the timbers in planed pine trim and used 12mm WBP ply for the openings and panels. I'm pretty happy with the finished look of the boxes, through I think next time I'd use prepared timber for the structure so we didn't have to cover everything completely.

The ply is fixed to the aluminium.

Once the boxes were complete and the electrics were sorted and all wired up it was time to make a start on finishing the actual bed frame. The aluminium had been knocking about on the boat for quite some time as other jobs had demanded attention (wait for another post) so I was pleased to finally be able to cut the ply (12mm WBP again) that would create the box and get it fixed to the angle. As the whole frame doesn't fit through the front doors I had to construct everything outside on the bank, and then take it all apart and rebuild it inside.

Laying everything out and making sure it all fits.

To fix the aluminium to the ply I used M5 machine screws evenly spaced along each side. The technique for this was pretty fiddly, but it's worth taking the time to ensure the ply is a perfect fit. No one wants gaps at the corners, and it's helpful if the box has right angles at the corners! I ended up clamping, checking, adjusting, clamping, checking... you get the idea, until it was perfect (or pretty close to) and then I could drill through the angle and ply at the same time to make sure the holes would line up. Once drilled I could pop the machine screws in to hold it in the same position I had clamped it.

The finished bed in the "down" position.

The bed is hinged from four fire door hinges, which is probably overkill as they are fairly beefy hinges that are usually holding up heavy doors (fire doors often have a beech core and can weigh up to 120kg), but we wanted to be confident that they could take the weight of the bed. Also we picked them up cheap at £1.50 each from Oxford Wood Recycling (again, more on them in another blog post) so thought we'd better make good use of them. To allow the barrel of the hinge to clear the box the bed is sat on I made a 9mm ply plinth to raise the hinge up slightly off the box.

Where did it go? The bed folds neatly against the cabin side.

On the other side the bed comes to rest on the other box, however as the ply is only 12mm thick and we're coming down onto softwood trim I had concerns that over time we would end up marking the trim, so I made some "feet" that attach to the underside of the bed that allows the weight to rest on the lids of the storage sections.

Hinges on their plinths.

For the bed slats we had a lot of long rippings (timber cut lengthways along the grain) left over from when we lined out the cabin sides and ceiling. These were all odd widths and several had angled cuts through them from where the ceiling met the wall so couldn't really be used for much else. As we won't see the slats it doesn't really matter if they aren't all even widths or have scruffy edges. These were bolted down the the frame leaving a roughly even space-to-slat ratio.

Slats with a foot beneath.

As the bed is fairly heavy we decided to utilise pulleys with a counterweight to aid in lifting the far end of the bed. We haven't yet figured out the perfect weight, but the system is working pretty well. I have yet to sleep in the bed, but I did have a test-lie the other day and I can definitely say it performs it's job as a platform for lying on perfectly!

Rope and pulley.