My Story

As I went through a career transition, my family and I moved from a large house in the suburbs into a small condo in the city. Most four bed room condos or apartments in the city are rare and expensive. Because my children lived with us only part of the time, a two bedroom condo was doable for us, but we knew we would have to get clever with the use of our space.

Why a Murphy vs. Hide-A-Way

Beds take up a lot of room. Hide-a-way beds still take up a lot of room and didn’t appeal to our decor style. So I started researching murphy beds. Murphy beds or wall beds are great for turning small rooms into multiple purpose rooms, at the same time, keeping your decor options open. Best of all, unlike like a hide-a-way bed that takes up floor space, a murphy bed creates space.

Not For My Grand Mother’s House

I soon discovered that most of the murphy beds that are available looked like they belonged in my grandmothers house. And they were expensive! This began my quest for an affordable wall bed, that looked good.

Build My Own to Save Money

I found a company that sells plans to build your own murphy bed. This looked like a good option. Their wall bed mechanism cost about $275+ and included plans on how to construct a murphy bed. They claimed that with their mechanism, it would take only minutes to assemble. Of course I soon found out it would it take days, even weeks to build, stain and finish the bed frame. After calculating the cost to build a my own murphy bed, it wasn’t looking good.

How Will I Build It?

The only problem was that I didn’t have the tools and space to build the bed! I would have to spend at least another $200 to $400 for tools and then I would need a place to build it. My garage was too packed and frankly, clearing out the garage was a task I wasn’t ready to do. So building a murphy bed was out of the question.

MacGyver Meets Ikea

I love Ikea! I’m also a pretty good Ikea Hacker. The thing I like the most about Ikea products are that they’re cheap, they look good and they can be assemble with a few simple tools. But, I was surprised to find out that they don’t carry any murphy beds! Then I had a MacGyver moment! I would convert an Ikea bed into a murphy bed! (For those of you who don’t remember MacGyver, he was that cheesy action hero during the 80’s that could build a nuclear detector out duct tape and his Swiss Army knife.) It seemed simple enough, but it became a long lesson in physics. But after months of trial, error and patching all the screw holes I made in the wall from trying various ideas, the Moddi Bed was born!

The Moddi Bed Phenomenon

When friends and family saw it, they wanted to know how I built it. So I drew up crude plans on a napkin. People started calling me out of the blue with questions about the photocopy of the plans I drew. Some people made suggestions to make it better and some criticized it because they could do it better. As the emails increased, I decided to incorporate some of the suggestions, fine tune the design and see if I could make a couple bucks. So here it is, the Moddi Murphy Bed Plan!