What we sleep on at night.
Moving right along. Time to build where we are going to be sleeping. The bed and its frame. We knew that we wanted to have the side walls out of knotty pine. And since the knotty pine was so expensive we decided to use 1/8th” underlayment for underneath the bed (the garage). We found it at home depot and it comes in a 4×8 sheet for 10 bucks or so. The same area would have costed double almost triple if we would have used the knotty pine paneling. We used the factory plastic panels that were in the van as templets. After they were cut out we sanded down the edges and sealed it with Minwax Polycrylic. Before mounting the 2x4s and the side wall paneling your going to want to cover the insulation and van metal with a sheet of plastic used as a moister barrier. We then ran a 2×4 on the lower main beam of the van for the main support of the bed. Making 3 legs out of 2×4 for each side that will help support the main horizontal 2×4.
Now it will look like this.
At this point we were still unsure what we were going to store down here. Wether it would be bicycles or just misc. items. We were able to fit 6 storage containers and 2 bicycles laid on top of each other.
We used these hangers to attach the runners for the bed support to the main 2x4s. I think they worked out great.
The 2×4 runners installed with the hangers.
Using a 2×4 as a runner you will have a void spot if you were to slap a sheet of plywood on top. So what we did was we enclosed the bottom of the runners with a sheet of plywood, and the ¾ inch sheet that will be on top we cut into 3 different sections that gives us 3 long term storage compartments. 2 compartments will be accessible through the kitchen/living room area. The bigger compartment will be accessible through the rear doors or the garage.
We happened to have an extra mattress laying around the house that we are using. Ikea has some good prices for foam mattress’s that we would have used if we didn’t have one already.
That’s pretty much it for the bed. On to the overhead storage.
