If you’ve followed the build, you know the bed goes up into the ceiling. What you probably don’t know is the myriad of optimistic/terrible ideas I went through before landing on the one that actually worked.
Attempt one was basically a forklift. A full structural mechanism was desired, but there were too many load calculations for my brain to comprehend or even bother dealing with. This one was mostly chasing an aesthetic rather than a solution however. Then it occurred to me I could just put cables on each corner instead, and suddenly the engineering genius I thought I needed to be turned out to be unnecessary. A few more dead ends followed, hidden weight panels, a powered mechanism, roller tracks, before the cable and counterbalance system won by simply being the one that didn’t fall apart on paper.
The real problem was that our roof is foam filled vinyl and was never going to hold the 220 kilos this system needed. The fix came from some heavy duty poles I’d salvaged off the trailer’s old back doors, which happened to be exactly the right length to span the whole thing and let the load hang off the rigid frame instead of the roof. Very deceptive looking at it now. A genuinely absurd amount of planning went into something that just looks like a bed with cables at the corners.
The other half of the counterbalance is a cabinet of secondhand gym weights, because apparently the structural integrity of my bedroom now rests on bargain-bin dumbbells someone was desperate to offload. I’m choosing to see that as resourceful rather than concerning!
Getting the height right was its own litany of challenges – and I still got it wrong. I built the cabinetry early, guessed at clearances, forgot to account for the pulleys, and then we upgraded the mattress a few years later just to make my past self look even more optimistic. Somehow it all still lines up, in both bed mode and the dining chair, boat seat, feature wall version of the room.
So how do I feel about it four years on? Genuinely good, mostly. It works exactly as a bed should, hasn’t dragged us into the ceiling in our sleep, and the storage box access underneath is pretty cool and handy. It’s not perfect though. Heidi has strong opinions about changing the sheets on it. It’s a bit noisy going up and down, easy to knock off balance, and slow enough to deploy that we often just don’t bother and treat it like a normal bed with junk shoved underneath.
What I’m actually proud of isn’t the carpentry, it’s that this was a physics problem wearing a carpentry costume, and it came in thousands $$ cheaper than anything commercial. Check out the full build, how it works for us and my verdict in all its glory on the video on YouTube.
If you’ve ever built anything with a counterbalance or a load-bearing mechanism, tell me your version of the story. Even if it involves secondhand gym equipment!
