The Floor, The Ceiling, and Everything in between (Storage — Part 1)
It took two long weekends, but the bed is finally ready. I still need to find a way for the bed mattress to become a couch mattress without too much hassle. Since I’m probably going to add shelves next to the bed pieces that fold, I’ll make the mattress afterwards, in a way that makes sense given the bed space I have left.
The next stage is to build the various storage units: The kitchen drawer, the storage under the bed and the shelves above the bed. Since I don’t have a lot of time until I go on my roadtrip, I think I’m only going to build the kitchen drawer, whereas the other storage units under the bed will just be a few boxes I can fit under there (Still need to figure out how to make sure they don’t fly around while I’m driving). Regarding the shelves, I’ll have to replace the ceiling with a wooden ceiling first, so I will have something more sturdy to fix them to.
This post will be dedicated to the kitchen drawer, and I will talk about the shelves (and what I’ve decided to do with the rest of the storage under the bed) in the next post.
So The kitchen drawer is placed next to the kitchen’s plumbing section. Half of it under the kitchen table and the other under the bed. Since the kitchen table is higher than the bed, I decided to take advantage of that and make the front half of the kitchen drawer slightly higher than the back half. The drawer itself will be connected using drawer runners to an outer box, that in it’s turn will be fixed to the kitchen table, to the bed and to the right wheel guard.
In order to access their contents, the top of both compartments will be connected using hinges.
I found a good heavy duty drawer runners that are 450mm long, and expand to 900mm, and can hold up to 45kgs, which is exactly what I needed.
Having said that, I will still need to support the drawer when it’s expended, and for that I will attach legs that fold under the drawer when it’s folded. However, the legs need to be 60cm long, but the drawer only expands to 45cm, therefore, I need to have legs with two sets of hinges, like so:
I’m still not sure how to prevent the drawer from expanding while I drive, but I guess a simple piece of wood that is attached to the kitchen table and goes all the way down across the drawer will do the trick.
