How To Make a Low Cost Murphy Bed

Makercise Murphy Bed

Take a look at the YouTube video documenting the process.

I built this hanging murphy bed with a dry erase board on the back for about $85. It took me a Sunday afternoon and several evenings during the week. I have used this four times since I built it a month ago. Wow! That is WAY more use than I anticipated, and I can quickly stow it on the wall and use the space–complete with an extra dry erase board now. The David Piccuito inspired boxes help neatly stow the linens.

I am really happy with the PVC legs. They are plenty sturdy. Be sure to grind down the ridge on the inside of the fittings before attempting to glue up the legs. Two of the legs stuck because the purple primer gunked up. I had to quickly pry them off and further open up the fittings to get them to go on. You should be sure that there is plenty of play so you can slide the fitting down and over the glue. I used a 1-5/16″ forstner bit to drill the hole and recess for the legs. I did have to buy this bit and the rasp especially for this project. Those tools aren’t included in the $85 price tag, but who needs an excuse to buy more tools.

The hard board that I got from Home Depot did not initially work well for dry erase. I was pretty bummed about it. Basically, I attribute this to the coating on it that is probably anti-fungal. The intended application would likely benefit from this coating. Dry erase boards do not. The problem was that the dry erase beaded up like water on a rain-ex coated window. Essentially this made it almost impossible to use. I tried several different solutions. Eventually I found that using Xylene seemed to degrade the coating enough to prevent the dry erase ink from beading without degrading the surface enough that the dry erase ink was hard to erase.