Video Link: BRV005 | This Old Slat Bed (YouTube)

When it comes to adding a bed to your van, there are only a few options. Some people opt for a permanently mounted solution, while others — especially those with smaller vans — tend to go with a transforming bed. The advantage and disadvantage of a permanently mounted bed is the same: it’s always a bed. That’s good if you don’t want to mess around with turning a bench into your bed every single night and changing it back every single morning. They also, generally speaking, offer more storage underneath. The tradeoff for those luxories is space. A standard queen-sized mattress is 80″x60″. The rear of my van is 120″x72″. With a smaller van like mine, this only works if you plan to eat, change clothes, and work on the computer from bed. The way to reclaim some of that space is to build a bed that shrinks in size during the day and expands in size each night.

You might be asking yourself, “why not just use a futon?” And the answer is, a few people do. Unfortunately, futons have almost no storage space beneath them, and those mattresses can be a real pain to deal with. It’s a doable but unpopular option.

I’ve watched a dozen videos on YouTube by people who have built their own slide-out beds. Each one is generally the same, with the devil being in the details. Heights and widths differ, but the concepts are all the same. These beds consist of two parts — a stationary base, and a second part with intertwining support slats that slides out to expand the width.

Even after watching all those videos on YouTube, I was still having problems wrapping my head around parts of the build. What keeps the sliding part from falling through the slats? How does it slide back in without falling down? What supports the weight? Everything made sense while watching the videos and by the time I made it out to the workshop I would forget how it worked. Finally, I decided the easiest way to construct a working model would be using a CAD program.

I used TinkerCAD to build this model. TinkerCAD isn’t really the right tool for this job (it’s for designing models to use with 3D printers) but it’s both powerful and simple to use at the same time. Each little block on the print area represents a centimeter in real life, but I just pretended like they were inches. The goal wasn’t to build an accurate 1:1 model; it was just to see what should attach to what, and it worked for that. And, in theory, I could print it out!

Everyone in #vanlife talks about how things should be lightweight, and so instead of using 2x4s for the bed, I used 2x2s for the support beams and 1×3 slats for the mattress support. I’ve never built anything using 2x2s before, which turned out to be both a blessing and a pain. 2x2s are in reality 1 1/2″ x 1 1/2″, so doing the math when figuring lengths and cuts is pretty simple. Unfortunately, I ran into two problems. The first problem is that a 2×2 is nowhere near as strong as a 2×4. (I guess that’s why they don’t build houses out of 2x2s.) The bed I built was 6′ wide, and without a support leg i n the middle of the bed, it bows — and that’s with 2 2x2s in the front and another two in the back. The other problem is that of the ten 2x2s I bought, not a single one was straight. Of the ten, seven were bent or curved, and three were twisted. The twisted ones were the worst — I’d line up everything flush on one end, and by the time I got to the other end nothing would be flat. Also, some of the 2x2s had so much rot that instead of being square, they were almost rounded on one of the four sides. I guess the next time we go to Home Depot we will have to be a bit more picky about the wood we purchase. Most of the 1x3s I bought were curved but not warped, and straightened out when screwed into place.

To go with the bed I purchased two firm blocks of foam from Amazon for about $50 each. Each block is 6′ long, 2′ wide, and 6″ thick. My idea was to put one mattress vertically as a backrest (which would be 6″ wide when standing up) and the other as a seat cushion, meaning the bed when pushed in needed to be 30″ deep and 6′ wide. When extended, the bed needed to be 48″ so I could just lay down both mattresses. You can watch how I came up with my numbers in the video, but using some quick match it was pretty simple to figure out how long everything needed to be.

The biggest logistical problem I ran into was that I needed to attach a long bar underneath all the moving slats to keep them from shifting around. I cut a 6′ piece and then cut another 1/2″ off so it wouldn’t lock up against the sides and attached all the slats to it. Without seeing it in person this might not make sense, but attaching the sliding slats above to the sliding rail below sandwiched all the stationary slats together in a bind, preventing everything from moving. What I ended up doing was removing all the moving slats and inserting washers in between the slats and the guide bar, which gave everything just enough room to slide without locking up. One of the punishments for diving in without plans is that when you run into problems you have to be willing to disassemble things to fix them. I probably disassembled this bed four or five times before everything was working.

I was real scientific when it came to figuring out how tall to make the bed. Basically, I got inside the van, sat on a bucket, measured how much head clearance I had, and made a guess from there. You don’t want to make the bench too low otherwise you’ll lose all your underneath storage and getting up and down will be a pain, and if you make it too high you’ll be sitting with a crooked neck all day. The shortest I could make the legs and still have the bed clear the wheel well without some fancy cutting was 11″, so that’s what I went with. Basically, the bed is 11″, plus 1 1/2″ (2×2), plus 3/4″ (slat) plus 6″ (mattress). I still have about a fist’s clearance between my head and the ceiling.

One of the last things I did was paint everything white. I thought this would make the boards slide more easily, but it seems to have had the opposite effect. They stick together, badly. If (when) I do this again, I’ll either use spray paint with a clear coat, or not paint the wood at all. I really wanted to paint the bed frame so it looked like something I bought rather than something I made, but in its current state it just looks like something I made and then painted badly.

Once everything was assembled, I tossed the bed into the van for a test run. The legs barely fit in between two wall supports (I got lucky), and the mattresses fit as I had hoped. There are some things I just didn’t realize until after I’d built it. For example, the combined width of the mattresses is 30″, so I made the bed 30″ deep — seems logical, except the entire time I was sitting on the couch, the backs of my legs were rubbing up against the ends of raw wood. In retrospect, I should have left a 1″ gap or something. I also didn’t anticipate just how firm that firm foam would be. I’ll have to purchase a thin topper to go on top of it if I want to avoid back pain. The other problem with the bench is that 24″ is too deep for me to lean against the back and still do something like use a laptop. I’m not sure how to overcome that problem, except by adding some throw pillows up against the back mattress.

In keeping with the van’s theme the bed is not perfect, but I gave it a quick test run (more on that in a future video) and, to paraphrase Shrek, “it’ll do, Donkey.”