Everything You Need to Know About DIY-ing a Murphy Bed & More

A Create-A-Bed Review

My husband, Doug, and I built a Murphy bed this past summer and guess what?  We are thinking about building another one! 

A little over a year ago I started working a hybrid schedule and work from home 2-3 days a week.  I worked on our kitchen island during that time and grew tired of having to clean up my workspace every night so we could have dinner.  I also didn’t love seeing my work sitting there waiting on me the next day.

Doug and I had talked several times about building a Murphy bed in an unused bedroom. The bedroom was being used as storage and it was out of control.  We kept the door shut all the time so we didn’t have to look at it.

When I heard that it was time to sign up for the One Room Challenge, I told Doug I thought we should build a Murphy bed for the challenge.  He was mostly on board.  Now, when I say that this is what I mean:  Doug is the most supportive husband you could ever dream of. He supports me and cheers me on in any and everything I try to do. This challenge though?  It’s 8 weeks long and building a Murphy bed in 8 weeks sounded a little daunting. 

Let me tell you.....it was!  

Once the decision was made to build a Murphy bed, I had to do the research to find the plans. I quickly realized that buying a hardware kit was going to be much more economical than buying an already made Murphy bed. The really good quality Murphy beds I found were around $4,000.  A kit is around $300-$400.  Of course, we still had to buy the wood, cut the wood and put everything together and do custom finishing, but we had a lot more creative freedom this way and we liked that idea. 

While researching Murphy bed kits, the one that stood out to me was the Create-A-Bed kit. They have been in business since 1985 and their reviews are fantastic!  I reviewed their website and also Pinterest for a style of bed I wanted for this room. The hardware kit comes with a lifetime warranty and they really stand behind the quality of their kits. A full set of instructions comes with the kit and we followed them precisely to build our bed.  It truly is a step-by-step process with diagrams and all the instructions and measurements you need to build a solid Murphy bed.  

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Once I received the kit, I reviewed the instructions and checked to make sure we had all of our parts – check!  Next, I made a copy of the cut list and we went to the home improvement store to buy our wood.  The wood for this project cost around $300.  Once we had the wood home, we set out cutting the pieces.  I think this was the most difficult part of the whole project. And, I’ll tell you why......we were using a hand me down table saw that we inherited from my Dad and it had seen better days.  The guide wouldn’t stay in one place so we had to snap chalk lines and kind of freehand it.  What this meant was that Doug was having to guide this 4x8’ of plywood through the saw and I was on the other side to catch it so it wouldn’t kink up the saw. It was daunting, but it was also kind of fun. We had beautiful weather and it’s always kind of fun to work on projects together. 

Once we had all of the pieces cut, which took us about 2 days, we were ready to start assembling the bed. We set up a workstation in the room so we could assemble the bed. This is where the instructions are so important.  The steps need to be followed in order and you have to use the right size screws, etc. It was time consuming.  We worked on the weekends and worked during the week an hour or two every night to get the bed built in the 8 weeks.  

We had one small hiccup when assembling the bed when we used a very special screw in the wrong place.  We thought that we may not have enough of the special screws so I called Create-A-Bed to ask for more screws.  I talked to this very nice gentleman named Aaron.  He asked me to text him photos of the screws we had left and he wanted to see pictures of where we were in the build process.  Aaron calculated how many screws were left and assured me that we had plenty to finish the project.  He then gave me some insider tips on how to finish off the bed, add trim, etc.  I really can’t say enough good things about this company!  Everything worked so great and we are thrilled with the result!   

If you’d like to follow the whole project step-by-step, check out my blog posts below!
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