STUDIO BLOG

My son’s birthday was approaching and he’s always wanted aloft bed, but true to my pedigree as a designer, none of the products I could find on the marketplace appealed to me. So as is typical when faced with a problem in my life, the answer was to design my own solution. We moved him out to the living room and sealed off his room without telling him what was going on. Below is a step by step progression of the project.

Step one: design!

This was the concept model (shown in sketchup). He has a relatively small room (10’ x 12’) which is always full of junk as one would expect of a 9-year old. Our goal was to fit something into the corner that would not interfere with the window that was already there, and would give him space below for his desk. Since the room is small, we also wanted to avoid filling it up with a bulky frame that would have posts standing out in the room. The idea of floating a bed on top of a metal beam was born:

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Step two: demo!

The metal beam would need to be anchored to some structure at either end, which mean opening up the walls to get some blocking in.

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Step three: Blocking installed,

it was time to get the metal beam in place. Luckily a neighbor of mine is a metal fabricator (Joel Hirschfeld of Hirschfeld Fabrications) and had a spare piece of aluminum tube lying around the shop – all I had to do was give him some basic details for the ends of the tube and voila!

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Since, as is typical of my do-it-yourself projects, the deadline came and went before I was halfway done, we presented him with a series of plans and renderings for his birthday rather than a new bed. Along with the news that he had one more month to go sleeping in the living room.

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