Our home made, hand crafted, part fixed, part sliding bed.

This in our opinion is the holy grail of bed solutions for a medium wheel base van IF…you are over six feet tall and have a medium wheelbase van (so need to sleep length ways) AND want or need a garage area for bikes, paddle boards and adventure gear. It’s neither fully fixed or fold away. It’s part fixed and part slider!

I am normally very sceptical about hybrids. From experience two things that were meant to carry out a purpose is better than having one thing that meant to do both. Bikes are a good example of this. I prefer road or mountain, not one for both. Anyway back to the bed.

The thinking behind the design

Build a bed frame like a single bed so if one person is using it they can sleep on this width ways IF they are 5ft 5 inches or smaller; then have a sliding part for taller or more than one person. We found that the sliding part snagged approx 4 inches from full extension so we couldn’t achieve the length we needed. We decided to castellate the frame to allow for full extension. With the advice from a friend (Craig – shout out!) we decided on old school hand tools – chisels, tenon saw and a rasp. 104 cuts, lots of chiselling, finishing and a lot of sweeping up and hoovering later we achieved the look below (pictures 1 & 2 below) We have 4 more slats arriving later this week then we’ll set about installing into the van.

How high? Real high! Cause I’m just so fly.

We guess the dated Kriss Kross reference will only appeal to a few people these days. Here we’ll talk about how we decided the height of the bed! We wanted our bikes to fit underneath, so we took the front wheel off. Any form of bike transport that needs both wheels taking off is just a hassle in our opinion. Once we’d taken the front wheel off we lowered the seat/saddle and measured the height. It was roughly 34 inches or approximately 86.5cms in height – bed height established! We sense checked this with being sat on the bed and sitting up too!

Measurements

Remember these measurements are for our van – it’s a 2008 MK7 ford transit medium height medium wheelbase (L2H2) and in addition to that your van even if it’s the same van might still be different. It will be subject to how you have have tailored your van. It depends on your depth of insulation and choice of wall material and thickness.

Our bed is 5ft 6in or 1.68 metres wide
When the bed is away it is 3ft 5in deep
When extended out fully the bed is 6ft1in or 187cm in length

What we used (tools and materials)

Magnusson Tenon Saw
Range of Chisels
Combination of 44mmx44mm PSE Whitewood & Redwood
Ikea luroy slats 90mm
Slats from an IKEA Kura bed – they’re more sold timber slats (also 90mm)
19mmx32mm sawn timber
Rasp
Countersink drill bit
Wood drill bits
Drill / Driver
Clamps
Screws
A good hoover
And as always lots of tea!