Designing my own Bed

Fri, 31 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I’m moving.
No, not websites! I already did that this year. I’m moving house - or rather flat.
Honestly, I’m so excited. Excited to be living somewhere new, and excited to design and decorate my new room.

I Want

There are a couple of things I’ve been looking forward to, when moving to a bigger place. The most important one is probably having a wider bed.
My current bed measures 200 by 90 cm and I would totally love to upgrade to a 200 by 140 cm bed.

I also watched the Simone Giertz “why do beds have to be so boring” video, where she shows off her elevated bed frame, which can fit a movable drawer unit underneath.
There is so much storage space you gain, by lifting the bed up from the floor - it is insane.

In contrast to the Simone Giertz video, I think I would prefer my bed to be accessible from both sides, which would also allow me to add storage solutions on either side.
From my quick search online, it seems that there are not really any elevated-bed options for sale, so I guess I’ll have to make one myself.

Initial Idea

I started designing the bed before we were handed the keys, so I had to base everything off of measurements I got from the apartment listing and measurements I had taken in real life.
So, to get a better sense of how a large bed might fit into the room, I made a 3D model using SolveSpace. (You should totally check out their wiki, it is an amazing CAD program)

I tried to keep the drawing fairly minimal, as my main goal was to get a sense of how much space for walking around there would be and most importantly how the tall bed might affect the visual “weight” of the room.
But I quite like how spacey everything looks even with the large bed. It should even allow me to place a yoga mat down or some pillows to relax on.

The bed might appear a little massive, but I think a lot of that comes down to it just being a box with no details.

My first idea, was building a vaguely rectangular structure, with no cross-beams on the lower long sides, so it can fit a chest drawer on either side, similar to how Simone Giertz has it on her bed. (Which she just removed - noooooo)
The obvious choice for this would be the IKEA MALM “Chest of 6 drawers”, which looks cute and is fairly affordable.

But when I discussed the design with my dad - who does a lot of woodworking in his free time - we quickly realized, that the IKEA drawers weren’t going to cut it, as they are shallow and appear fragile.

At first, I considered building the drawers myself and mounting them directly to the bed frame.
However, when I went to check the price of wood of my local hardware stores, I dismissed that idea as well, because I could not justify the price.

Back to the drawing board

After sleeping on it a bit, I decided, that I could save a lot of money, and allow myself room for customization, if I divided the bed into continuous shelf units.
I know that some items don’t store that well on a shelf, but I can just put them in a box and use the box like a drawer. Which is basically how I store a lot of my stuff already.

🔵 Note

I lost my initial sketch - sorry

Just like with the first idea, I ran the idea by my dad, to get some feedback on the structural soundness of my design.
And after getting his nod of approval, it was time to get real and figure out the actual measurements and materials.

Real on Paper

The new bed design has two rows of shelves. The lower one fits full-sized IKEA KALLAX boxes, and the top one is designed to fit either the half-sized KALLAX boxes, or the smaller IKEA BESTA boxes. The shelves are subdivided into two larger sections and one smaller sections, giving me room for five boxes per layer.
I went with IKEA boxes for this as the shelf systems have been sold for years now, and are fairly popular, meaning that accessories can be found online from third-party manufacturers for cheap. It also increases the odds of me being able to find parts in a few years time.

The rest of the design is based around the wooden beams available in my region, trying to get the bed as sturdy as possible, while also staying within my <500€ budget and making the build process as easy as possible.¹

I decided to do the designing on paper, as it allowed me to spend time away from my computer. I also really enjoy working with a pencil and a ruler, so I found the entire process quite relaxing.
It definitely would have been nice to have a proper 3D model though, even just to get some reference dimensions. The only model of the bed I made was meant as a preview, to show off the individual parts of the bed. If you want, you can download the OpenSCAD design file and explore it yourself.

The design of the bed is split into the individual logical units, across a couple of pages.
During the making process, I noticed that some of my annotations were wrong and corrected them, so don’t be surprised if you see random pencil marks on there.
I also changed some aspects of the bed (i.e. added missing parts, removing parts or redesigning them), so those drawings don’t accurately reflect the bed I ended up building.

The Core

I started the design process by working on the core bed structure.
The design features four roughly 8 cm wide legs on every corner, with long beams resting on top, spreading the weight between them. Because wide beds need a support beam along the middle, for the slats to rest on, I added more legs to support it as well.
I also added two support legs on each long side, both to support the long beams themselves and to add support for the shelf units.
Those support legs are also present in the middle underneath the central support beam, although they are made out of wider wooden beams, so that all horizontal beams can properly rest on them. (Complicated, I know)

The shelf cross-beams connect to the legs of the bed and are interlinked using more of the same beams to provide proper support for the shelf inlays.
These were initially meant to be made from 1 cm thick particle board, but I decided on 5 mm MDF instead, as they are cheaper and plenty strong enough.

I also decided to make the bed base slats out of normal wooden beams as well, as they are both easier to mount to the rest of the base and again: it is cheaper this way.

Canopy & Mattress Casing

When I was browsing through some online articles about building your own bed (they all build flat beds btw), I saw someone build a canopy bed, and I was on board pretty much immediately.
Not only have I wanted this for ages, I also figured, that it would make the bed appear less massive, as the canopy legs help balance everything. After remembering my collection of IKEA plastic vines, I also got the idea to make the canopy more whimsical by adding vines to it.

The canopy and the mattress casing (which hides the bed slats) are made out of Douglas fir beam, as they look slightly more interesting than the bright spruce wood I used for the other beams.
The red-orange hue of the beams should also fit nicely with the green of the vines.

To make the canopy legs easier to mount to the bed base, I decided to combine two 10cm wide beams into an L-shape, which can be screwed onto the 8 by 8 cm legs on the corners.
The canopy legs (as I like calling them) are then connected together on the top from the inside, using more beams.

To hide the mattress slats and round off the design overall, I decided to add more Douglas fir beams between the canopy legs.

Getting everything ready

After running this final design by my dad (our favourite reoccurring character in this post), things were starting to get real.

I started by collecting all the required parts in a Parts list, so I could figure out from what sort of beams to cut which parts, resulting in my bill of materials. ²
I’m estimating that optimising the parts that way saved me about 50 to 100 euros in total.

We got all the wooden beams from the same local craft store, from whose website I had taken the beam measurements before.
We also ordered multiple different types of screws online, and I spent multiple days cutting the beams to length, test-assembling parts of the bed and glueing sub-assemblies.
Again my Dad helped with this, by going shopping with me, giving advice on where to place screws and which type to use, giving me access to his workshop and assisting in some of the operations.
Thanks Dad.

Uhhh, let me make up for the sketch I lost earlier, by showing you the photo I took of the canopy legs drying at dusk.

Assembly

When the first moving-day came, I packed our car with all the beams, screws and a toolbox full of woodworking tools, so I could get to work on building the bed.

I started by assembling the base of the bed, making sure the bed frame was square, and the outer legs were positioned correctly.
Next, I lifted the base frame up on the four outer legs and screwed them in place.

Afterwards, everything went a little fast, and I sort of forgot to take pictures.
Basically, I mounted the side legs and installed the third long beam along the center, which in turn allowed me to mount the two inner legs and the corresponding cross-beams and shelf support beams.
Once all of those were in place, I went on to add the slats, which is when I remembered that I forgot to take pictures.

Lastly, I assembled the canopy structure.

All in all, the base assembly process took a little longer than expected, and what I initially thought would be possible in two days, took five (whoops).
And that is without the shelf inlays and mattress casing.

It took me another full afternoon to cut all the shelf inlays to fit around the legs.
I’m glad that I cut them with the measurements from the assembled bed though, as there appears to be some flex or distortion in it. So by cutting the inlays after assembling the bed, I could get them to fit (almost) perfectly.

Similarly to the shelf inlays, I measured the distance between the canopy legs after assembling the bed, to account for possible distortion.

To make it easier to get onto the bed, I also added small steps on either side (not included in the original design).

And with all that, the bed is finally done - I even added some of the vines to give you a sense of how the bed will look with them in place.
With my new mattress unfolded on the bed, I can finally spend a night in my new bed.

Final thoughts

I initially started this project because I wanted to have a 200x140cm bed and was inspired by the Simone Giertz video.
But it sort of ended as a way to be creative, challenge myself, learn something new and show myself that I still know how to do woodworking. I really loved the hands-on time it gave me, the breaks from my computer screen, the physical involved-ness of the making process, and obviously the product I ended up with.

I honestly love it so much - the bed looks so stunning and is so comfy.
You don’t even have to take my word for it: “It looks so cool - amazing” - my roommate ³

If you are looking for a new bed and need more storage space, I’d totally recommend looking at elevated designs.
You could try designing your own - just like I did. However, I would advise against using my drawings directly, as I changed a couple of things along the way.

But, I can tell you, it was worth it in the end.
I got some sleeping to catch up on. See you next time.

The 500€ is the upper limit - I obviously wanted to stay as low as possible. In case you were wondering: the limit is partially based on the price of the IKEA STORA loft bed frame, which is being sold for around 400€. It would have satisfied some of my requirements, except for being able to sit upright / sort of stand up on the bed, so I thought it would make for a reasonable comparison. ↩︎
At least our hardware store often sells out of specific lengths. I didn’t share the BOM and cut-list here, because they might be different for your location. They frequently offer different lengths at a different price, so you should check with your local supplier) ↩︎
“And they were roommates” ↩︎

Moving on Autumn Leaves