Sex in a lofted bed?

July 26, 2022 9:56 PM

I've got a small bedroom and I'd like to put a full or queen-sized bed up on a loft to make the most of the space. I also want to be able to have sex in the aforementioned loft without worrying about making it collapse. Are there loft kits that make this possible? Anything in particular I should look for when buying one?
posted by flexible-footwear figurine to Home & Garden (13 answers total)

Best answer: When my wife and I were first married I built us a loft bed.
A previous tenant had left a pile of 2x4s in the yard, so I used them. I nailed together a perimeter frame - a big rectangle the size of the bed - with 3" nails, put another across the long side - these were all standing on edge - and bolted uprights on, one per corner, with two 4 1/2" carriage bolts through the flat side of both boards in each corner.
It wasn't that wobbly but I'm a great believer in diagonal bracing, so I added chunks of some trim I had, about one and a half by three eighths of an inch and a foot or so long, one on each side of each leg, so two per corner, going from the leg at a 45 degree angle up to the frame. Because the legs were set inside the frame they didn't sit perfectly flat. I think I used one and a quarter inch nails. Diagonal bracing doesn't have to be very big, it just has to be there.
The result was very stable. Later beds I made had 1x4" decking nailed diagonally across the top with half inch spaces between them, for the mattress to sit on, but I didn't have any of those so I nailed through the sides of the box spring into the frame in four places, again with small nails. It didn't move. If you sit up in bed you have to do something so the mattress doesn't shift away from the wall, and nailing the box spring is easy.
If you don't want to put nails into your box spring (or you don't have one) you can nail a sheet or two of plywood to the top, put some trim around the edge so the mattress doesn't shift around, and it'll be fine. This was better because the only tools I needed were a handsaw and a hammer and a wrench to do the carriage bolts up. Also a drill to make 1/4" holes for them.
Bear in mind that a mattress is the better part of a foot thick, and so is a box spring. A seated human is maybe three feet high, but you want headroom, so allow forty or forty-two inches down from the ceiling, and add the thickness of the box spring and mattress. Unless you have nine foot ceilings you're not going to be looking down on ant-like people from a great height. (I built a similar one for a friend who insisted he needed only two feet of headroom, which lasted until he brought a woman home and there wasn't room for one of them to be on top of the other. I wrote a long article about this for our company newsletter, and I can send a link to it if you're interested in the actions of the insane.)
I was going to make a crude ladder up the side, but the house came with two massive and dead band speakers, so we lay on on its side and used them for steps until my wife was too pregnant to climb them, at which point we dismantled it and moved back to a mattress on the floor. (So we had sex in it.)
Wood is very strong. A 2x4 on end will take more weight than you could ever put on it. Your problem is rigidity, hence the carriage bolts (you should look these up) and diagonal braces.
I don't recommend a kit. It will cost 20x what it will to do it yourself, and if it's made of the crap materials you'd expect it won't be at all stable. I'm also not sure anyone makes them.
If you want something nicer, that is if you're not just married and broke, I recommend this book:
https://www.amazon.ca/Loft-Book-Jim-Wilson/dp/0914294326
It's a bit seventies, but I love my copy and the author knows more about lofts than anyone.
Send me an email if you want more advice or clarifications.
posted by AugustusCrunch at 11:07 PM on July 26, 2022 [18 favorites]

Best answer: Agree with AugustusCrunch about DIY. When we lived in a 14ft x 15ft x 9ft bedsit in the 70s, I rigged up a loft-bed in one corner maybe 5½ft off the floor with a work-desk underneath. Two sides (sides were ~4x1 because that was available) of the platform were screwed into the wall which dealt with shear-stress and the mid-room corner was supported in a 3x3 pillar. The top was a 8x4 sheet of ¾in laminated MDF beauty-board. I think it cost ~£2 in materials - mostly screws. It took a lot of bouncy-bouncy from a 2yo toddler and his parents. If you insist on it being free-standing you'll need to engineer it properly but if you bolt even one end to a wall, it will be solid. The 8x4 sheet handles the horizontal shear. Good luck; be sure to wear a hard-hat if you think you might roll off when your eyes are closed.
posted by BobTheScientist at 1:56 AM on July 27, 2022 [2 favorites]

Best answer: Add me to the chorus of successful loft bed designer/builder/sleeper/foolaboutiners who recommend 2x4s and a sketch pad over kits. It ain't rocket science. Design triangles into the frame anywhere you need rigidity that can't be provided by walls and you won't go far wrong.

Mine was in a rental with plaster over brick on the interior walls, and I didn't want to bolt anything to the building itself. It was quite a narrow room, only a foot and a half wider than the length of my queen size futon, so I made the loft bed the same length as the room's short wall and put it at one end. Pieces of cork tile jammed between the bed frame and the walls made the walls stabilize the bed, both against lengthways movement and against sideways movement toward the end wall.

To stabilize against sideways movement away from the wall I made the supporting legs on the wall side V shaped, and included a couple of horizontal members about two feet up from the floor to tie those V legs to the verticals on the room side. That made the end frames transfer the weight of the bed to four points on the floor, only two of which were under its corners; the bottoms of the V legs were about a foot and a half away from the corners on the wall side.

I used five 2x4s running the length of the bed to support the slats on top, and although these did end up a little bouncy they were never under anything even close to a breaking load. 2x6s would probably have been better but I was trying to minimize the structure's total thickness to make best use of the available ceiling height.

I made the bed enough wider than the futon to allow for a foot-wide plank running the length of it on the room side, and added another 2x4 right at the edge on top of that. Rolling accidentally off the futon, then, would have dumped me into a little gutter that I'd have needed to keep on rolling up and out of in order to fall over the edge of the bed.

All the framing timber was ordinary radiata pine, nothing fancy, held together with carriage bolts. I countersunk shallow holes for the cup heads on those so that they wouldn't sit proud of the framing members and make dings in the walls.

It was a good design. The only thing I'd change if I were to do the same job again would be to make the access ladder slope at about 10° instead of being completely vertical.
posted by flabdablet at 6:21 AM on July 27, 2022

Best answer: The other structural-soundness measure in that bed frame was half-inch-deep rebates cut into the uprights where the top rails in the end frames bolted onto them. That way, the weight borne by those rails transfers directly to the uprights at the bottoms of the rebates rather than presenting a shear load to the carriage bolts.

Not that half-inch carriage bolts would ever fail under that degree of shear, but spreading a load all the way along the bottom of a rebate is better than concentrating it all on the relatively tiny amount of wood around a bolt shaft. It makes the whole assembly more rigid and therefore feel much more reassuringly solid to all occupants, which is important when you're seven feet in the air.

I cut the same kind of rebates into the horizontal rails that tied the legs together near the bottoms, for the same reason. And I soaped all the wood-on-wood joints, which successfully prevented squeaking.
posted by flabdablet at 6:39 AM on July 27, 2022 [1 favorite]

Best answer: Many years ago now, my partner and I bought bunk bed and loft plans from a place called OP Loft Beds. The "OP" stands for "orgasm proof," though we wanted super-sturdy beds for our kids. Almost 20 years later, both beds are as unshakeable as ever. The loft and the top bunk have built in shelves, which are very useful. The only downside: they are extremely heavy, and the prospect of dismantling and moving them is daunting, but we live in a college town and figure that, when the time comes, we'll offer them free to anybody who will take them apart and haul them away.

We ordered the hardware kit with the plans, IIRC, and, because we were busy with small children, hired someone to build them for us. But they are very much within the capability of many DIYers.
posted by Well I never at 6:51 AM on July 27, 2022

Response by poster: Sadly, the OP Loft Beds buy plans page is missing now, though the rest of the site is up. Which is a shame, because they sound perfect.
posted by flexible-footwear figurine at 7:17 AM on July 27, 2022

Response by poster: It also looks like Home Depot also has free loft bed plans on their website, which look about as beefy as these other suggestions in terms of materials and lumber size, though I'm not really qualified to judge their sturdiness beyond that.
posted by flexible-footwear figurine at 7:27 AM on July 27, 2022

Since you’ve got several real answers, I don’t feel too guilty adding an irrelevant comment: I just want someone else to know that the title of your question scans the same as “Sun in an Empty Room” by The Weakerthans, and now I can’t un-hear it, and vaguely want to parody it.

Agree that this is eminently achievable. If you’re going to buy your own lumber (which I think is a totally reasonable way to go), make sure you do not get treated/exterior lumber, which has extra chemicals applied that you do not want near your bedding.
posted by Alterscape at 9:01 AM on July 27, 2022 [5 favorites]

Best answer: A brief search did not locate the OP Loft Bed plans, however there is a materials list on their current blog page.
There is also a text with pictures - How-to fabrication page on their older web site (Wayback Machine).
posted by tronec at 11:46 AM on July 27, 2022

Best answer: Two words: diagonal bracing.

Even short diagonals near (across) the corners will do wonders for stability.
posted by intermod at 6:43 PM on July 27, 2022

Best answer: A couple of considerations: A loft bed may be feasible in a cool/cold climate, but during activities, it is damn hot up there near the ceiling in a hot climate. Also using a ceiling fan is out.
posted by a humble nudibranch at 9:52 PM on July 27, 2022

Best answer: Even short diagonals near (across) the corners will do wonders for stability.

This is true, but long ones do more wonders.

Short diagonal braces that terminate part way along structural members convert shear loads on the overall structure to bending loads on those members, while long braces between existing joints or triangles inherent in the framing design convert them to almost purely tensile or compressive loads.

A tall frame will feel much more reassuringly rigid if it doesn't need to rely quite so much on the stiffness of individual framing members.
posted by flabdablet at 10:07 PM on July 28, 2022

Best answer: Short braces also mean that shear forces applied to the overall structure will be multiplied by leverage effects on their way to the joints between the braces and the framing, which greatly magnifies any tiny residual wiggle room in those joints, reduces their strength and potentially their long term soundness, and contributes to squeaking.
posted by flabdablet at 10:17 PM on July 28, 2022