The Bed — Part 1

So the kitchen stage is over, I have a working water system with a tap that’s also manually pumping water from a fresh water tank, into a sink that’s connected to a grey water tank. I solved the problem I presented in the previous post with drilling a new hold in the grey water tank’s body, and in the fresh water tank’s lid.

Sink and tap pipes screw and unscrew easy from the tanks for minimum wearing and tearing

The next stage is to build a bed that can fold easily into a couch, while taking the following guidelines into consideration:

1. The toilet needs to fit under the bed. I haven’t decided if I’m going to get a portable toilet or just build a simple compost one as a temporary solution, but every portable toilet I’ve looked at was ~36.5cm high and ~40cm wide, so I need to keep the bed higher than that, and the toilet storage unit a bit wider than that.
2. The bed needs to not only be stable, but also hold my weight. I’m using 12mm plywood that will probably curve a bit when I’m lying on it, so I need to strengthen it while making sure I don’t take up too much of the storage space under the bed.
3. The bed should be able to fold into a couch, but since some of the pieces have legs, I’ll probably try to fold them in using hinges because otherwise they will be in the way. This is the idea I have at the moment, I’m not sure how comfortable will it be, so either I find a way to make it comfortable, or find a different method to stabilize the pieces.

The bed will be ~43cm high, and 2.1m long. It’s width is comprised of four parts (see sketch #1):

• Part A is the very top of the bed, and it rests on the back of the kitchen and the van walls for stability, and located partially above the wheel guards. On the other side it’s connected to part B with fold-up hinges. it will be ~35cm long and ~153cm wide.
• Part B is fixed to the floor of the van and located partially above the wheel guards. It will be ~75cm long, and ~153m wide (the edge that’s overlapping with the doors is a bit narrower)
• Part C is narrower than Part A and Part B and located on the right side of the van, behind the driver seat. It’s connected to Part B with fold-up hinges, and has four legs that can fold in using hinges. It will be ~50cm long and ~70cm wide(~20cm far from the door)
• Part D is ~40cm long and as wide as Part C, and connected to it using fold-down hinges. On the other side it’s resting on a small box. At this point, this box is there only to support the bed, but I might find it more uses it in the future. In case the part needs more stability, I will add legs like Part C has. I might leave this part folded down sometimes, therefore it shouldn’t be longer than it’s distance from the floor.
• When the bed is folded into a couch, Part A is folded in above Part B, holding Part D as the back side of the couch, and Part C is folded all the way back so it’s on top of Part B (see sketch #2)

Sketch #1: Top view of the van

Sketch #2: Side view of the van

Note: According to the self-containment regulations, the toilet has to be accessible when the bed is not folded. In order to achieve toilet accessibility, Part C and Part D both have “missing” parts, as the toilet will be located under Part B, right next to the left wheel guard.

First, I’m going to work on Part B, as it’s the part that’s fixed to the van, and all the other parts are attached to it.

Update:
I was able to stabilize Part B only on four legs (two in the front on the floor, and two in the back on the wheel guards) using a strong frame I attached to the plywood (will add photos on the next post). This will allow me to have a bit more freedom when building the storage compartments. It’s helps a lot with the first two guidelines I mentioned in the post. The third is still a mystery.