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| The Almighty 4th West Bed Lofting System |
First, a bit of background on the project. When my friend and I first moved into the dorms freshman year, we had big plans to create a truly epic room setup. Even at the summer orientation, we had taken measurements of the room and sketched a few ideas of how to improve it's design. As it stood, the was fairly spacious. Vaulted ceilings, multiple windows, and standard furniture (desks, drawers, etc.) all allowed for inherent creative layouts. We toyed with ideas like making a knee high platform for our desks or a raised shag carpet area where we could put a conch and TV. Through brainstorming, we realized that our ideas were bigger than the square footage of our dorm. Our first thought to remedy this was to bunk our beds.
In most dorm rooms, the beds are set on university provided frames without any notches or attachment points for bunking. The only hint that bunking might be an option are four 1/4" holes atop each bed post. This means that to loft a bed, one would have to buy and cut metal rods into about 3" sections which could connect stacked bed frames. The benefit to lofting beds include a more open floor space, increased storage, space for activities, and a sense of juvenile spirit. Downsides include the danger of falling out of a high bed, subpar structural integrity, and fire code violations.
While a McGyver'd bed railing might have been a guard from fall protection, my roommate and I thought it best to construct our own, structurally safer, more extensive, lofting system. This would solve our square footage issue and grant us the opportunity to make something unique in the dorm system.
The design we settled on would take advantage of the vaulted ceilings in our room, which reached up to heights of roughly 14 feet at the peak. The blue shaded are of the block drawing below, expertly crafted in Excel, shows the part of the room we proposed to construct a platform with 8' clearance.
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| Top-Down View The black line represents the scale outline of the room. The blue shaded region shows the area lofted. The four rows on the bottom are unshaded because of an overhang. |
As a side note. It would be interesting if somebody who is actually knowledgable on such topics would critic our work. We are always looking to improve.
Neither my roommate nor I had any formal construction education, but throughout the years we had picked up on most of the standard practices from other projects. The goal of the design was to create a lofted area for our beds in the vault of the ceiling. Later on in the project we would add a half level "terrace" in the 4'x8' area not covered by the loft. This would serve as both a place to put our desks and as a step up to access the bed area.
With a final design in mind, we set about making technical drawings. Initially, we hand drew our structure on you guessed it, engineering paper left over from the previous day's calc homework. In an effort to be a bit more professional, we asked a mechanical engineering major to replicate our shoddy drawings in CAD.
Once we got all the materials together, we started actual construction. Because of the width of the stairwell in our dorm, we had to take out the window screen and feed the 12' 2x6's up from the ground outside. The length of these boards also posed an interesting challenge in maneuvering skills inside the room. We started by erecting the six 4x4 posts and screwing them into a rectangular frame on the top. Next we laid out joists that would support any weight placed on top of the structure. The last step was to add 1/2" plywood flooring to the top and supporting braces to the posts. After a few homey touches, we had a finished product.
However, the fun did not stop there! After news of our extravagant lofting system had spread throughout the dorm, we starting hearing from our University. We had expected this, as a large wooden structure in university housing has the tendency to be attract fire code violations. In preparation, we had gone through the housing handbook and reviewed the fire code. In the strictest sense, we were only breaking one rule, which involved the minimum proximity to the sprinkler heads. To show we were willing to do anything to keep our new loft, my roommate and I wrote up a formal 18-page proposal and submitted it for review by the university. Four weeks and a visit from the director of facilities later, the university deemed the structure not to code and ordered that it be removed.
Over the course of this project we learned many things. Not all of which were engineering and construction. Understanding the proper rules and regulations of the space you working with is just as important as the project itself. Even if you do something super cool, like 4th west, the rules are in place for a reason. If something happened, the consequences can always be magnified ten fold. That being said, we wished with all of our hearts that it could have stayed.
-John "It was like rolling out of bed...onto a shag carpet bed" Dunn
With a final design in mind, we set about making technical drawings. Initially, we hand drew our structure on you guessed it, engineering paper left over from the previous day's calc homework. In an effort to be a bit more professional, we asked a mechanical engineering major to replicate our shoddy drawings in CAD.
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Over the course of this project we learned many things. Not all of which were engineering and construction. Understanding the proper rules and regulations of the space you working with is just as important as the project itself. Even if you do something super cool, like 4th west, the rules are in place for a reason. If something happened, the consequences can always be magnified ten fold. That being said, we wished with all of our hearts that it could have stayed.
-John "It was like rolling out of bed...onto a shag carpet bed" Dunn
