How to build an elevated sofa

The Walden Effect: Farming, simple living, permaculture, and invention.

How to build an elevated sofa

Our elevated sofa bed is complete! Time for a long, step-by-step post showing how we did it.

Putting plywood on the frame As Mark mentioned earlier, we began by building the base for the mattress to sit on top of. Since the sofa may hold multiple people at a time, we wanted it to be sturdy, so we built a rectangle out of two-by-fours, added two braces in the middle, and topped it all off with a big sheet of plywood.

Next came the supports. One end will be open to the room, so we decided to make a bookcase to both hold the sofa aloft and increase our storage area.

The other end butts up against my office area, so we simply cut four-by-fours to act as legs there.

Inside, we pulled the ancient futon out and started preparing the space. Our trailer came with carpeting, which we ripped out nearly right away. I never got around to dealing with the metal rails that held the edges in place, though, and one strip was going to get in the way. So Mark pried it loose, nails and all.

Hollow door frame The door frame was also going to impact sofa placement, so Mark cut a notch with a sawzall. You might not want to try this at home in a real house. But trailers are so underbuilt they're easy to manipulate. Turned out that what looked like a massive hunk of wood was actually a hollow piece that was easy to pry loose.

Legs and bookcase in place and ready for the top....

We set the plywood box on top of the bookcase and legs and tapped it into place.

Next, Mark added brackets to connect the legs to the top...

...and a two-by-four at the bottom to finish bracing the structure.

He also added a two-by-four set on edge on the front of the bed platform to hold the mattress in place. Add in a memory-foam mattress (half the cost of the entire project), and Huckleberry was ready to check the new lounging station out.

It's great fun to sit a little higher and view the world from a new angle, although we might have to do something about heat in the summer months. In the meantime, we're pondering where to put a step to make the top easy to access and what to do with the storage space underneath. As Mom suspected, it's a little too low for winter-coat hanging and Mark's not sure about my idea of turning it into a seed-starting station. We'll see what happens after we've lived around the new piece of furniture for a few weeks.