Wardrobe cubby house and wall-mounted bed

[woodalwaysworks]

Turning a built-in robe into a two-storey cubby and wall-mounting a bed made this spare room more functional.

• The project
• Safety for wall-mounted bed
• Before and after
• Popular kids projects

The project

I've done several renovations this week in people's spare rooms and all of them have been dumping grounds and looked unused since last Christmas. But all still wanted to keep them as a permanent spare rooms. This made me come home and think about ours. We have a queen bed, which is a waste of floor space, and a built-in robe with no need to hang clothes in this room, so it becomes a dumping ground. The spare room has now become the play room.

The robe was converted into a two-storey playhouse.

We wall-mounted the queen bed and created an activity wall on the base.

There's a couple of straps to hold the mattress in place when the bed is lifted up.

The floor space is now clear for games and the room is useable 100% of the time.

Safety for wall-mounted bed

Put the following into practice with your wall-mounted bed project to keep the area safe:

• Locks. Most beds use a standard lock or catch. With mine being in a play room, I used a 10mm steel eyelet bolt which passes through the frame and bed once mounted and screws into a tee nut on the inside.

• Counter-balancing the bed. The bed is very heavy, so I installed four air pistons at the back. Two would have sufficed but because I installed the bed horizontally I thought it would be better to spread the load more evenly. Getting the pressure on these right was very tedious work, just so the bed could be lowered slowly and easily but then didn't have too much resistance to put away.

• Lowering mechanism: swivel plate 250mm square, 250kg vertical load bearing, 175kg horizontal. Fitted with four M8 bolts either side. Finding a plate with the internal moving space for the bolt head was the hardest thing, and something I didn't think of until I came to fit the first ones I bought. The positioning of the plates was also very important because I wanted the bottom of the bed to be 250mm off the ground, and this helped the design fit into the 400mm box frame I had designed.

Before and after

Popular kids projects

You'll find loads of clever ideas to entertain the kids, including plenty of cubby house designs, in our Top 10 most popular kids projects.