Updated on June 18th, 2021
Having a van bed frame has made it all seem real. The whole point of having a camper van is to have somewhere to sleep while out adventuring. Without a bed in your van, you are basically just a food truck. We decided to make our bed a short queen. This is a pretty standard RV mattress size which means we could order a mattress and bedding without having to make any alterations!
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Tools Needed:
- Circular or Table Saw (optional)
- Jig Saw
- Drill
- Impact driver (optional)
- Nail Gun (optional)
- Air Compressor (optional)
- Hammer (if you don’t use the nail gun and air compressor)
- Utility Knife
- Measuring Tape
- Straight Edge
- Square
- Scribing Tool–This time we used a scrap of wood
Materials Needed:
- 4×8 sheet ¾ Poplar Plywood
- 4×8 sheet ¼ Poplar plywood
- (6) Hinges
- 1” Brad Nails
- (4) Premium 2x4s
- 3” Construction Screws
- 2” Construction Screws
- #12 X ¾” Self Tapping Screws
Before You Start
You’ll want to check out our post/video on framing. This step needs to come before the rest or you will not have anything to mount your bed frame to!
Planning
Since we are not building a high top van we did not have a huge amount of room in the “garage”. We decided to build in storage compartments in the area between the supports, a space that would typically go unutilized as dead space.
Cut and Install 2×4 Supports
In our previous video/post on framing, we had already cut one of the widthwise beams for the bed. It was the rearmost one. Now we needed to measure for the other three, one in the front, and two for the center. You would not need three if you aren’t going to install the under bed storage drawers. Once cut, we installed these three beams using small blocks instead of corner brackets. Screw the block to the wall frame, and the widthwise beam to the block using screws.
The two center supports are 8 inches apart. We designed it this way to have a fixed point to attach hinges to but more about that in a little bit.
Install the Lengthwise Support Pieces
We used shorter 2×4 pieces running lengthwise to create further support and to provide us a place for the lifting pieces to rest. There are four of them, one on each side of the storage compartment. They are spaced two feet from the center line so that the lifting portion in the middle is four feet wide. Why four feet you might ask? Because a sheet of plywood is four feet wide and we were feeling lazy.
Cut Plywood for Top
We did this in several pieces. Seven pieces to be exact. There is a fixed portion in the middle, two hinged pieces at the front and back, and four lifting pieces in each corner. We installed the fixed portion first. You will need to leave half of the 2×4 stud exposed to provide support for the adjoining piece. We were lucky enough to find a piece of scrap that was exactly the right size! Don’t throw away scrap!! We both glued and screwed this piece to try and cut down on rattles.
The hinged portions of the van bed frame were cut and fitted. We needed to make sure that when they lifted they didn’t hit the countertop or the walls. Once we were relatively sure this wouldn’t happen we then screwed them to the fixed middle portion with hinges, using three on each edge.
Finally, we cut the lift out corner pieces. This required us to cut them as rectangles and then scribe them into place. If you are new here you might want to check out our subfloor video (0:56) for information on scribing. We decided to cut holes to be able to easily remove these pieces, this is completely optional. Honestly, I’m pretty sure Andy just wanted an excuse to use his router. We used a paddle bit to cut the initial hole and the router with a round over bit to clean them up.
Install Storage Compartment Bottoms
For this, we used almost a whole sheet of a 4×8 sheet of ¼” Poplar plywood. Ours didn’t need to be too heavy duty because we are only planning on using it for things like towels, small tools, and sh*t bits. They are essentially our “junk” drawers. We cut the sheet to fit and then Andy crawled under with his air nailer and put a lot of nails in the bottom. Like way more than he probably needed to. “If ten nails are good, a hundred nails must be better”. If you don’t have a nail gun you can use a hammer, “like a caveman”. Those are Andy’s words, not mine. Nail guns are pretty fun.
We did test fit our mattress at this point, which we regret and it was not included in our video for this reason. If you are buying a foam mattress wait until you are ready for the mattress to be in the van full time before you order or cut it open. They are not fun to move around after being inflated. But it was pretty great to pretend like the van was ready to use at this point so we took a nap before moving it back out.
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Thank you, this was very helpful.