Somewhere around the last part of November of 2000, I decided that I need more room in my computer room. Previously, it had a bed in it along with a desk and a few file cabinets. The queen size bed took up a significant amount of the floor space, but it did not get used very often, thus it was mainly a waste of floor space. For this reason, I decided to investigate the possibility of purchasing a loft bed. Queen size loft beds are quite rare and the ones that I could find did not seem acceptable from both an engineering and cost standpoint. The few that were stylistically interesting were overpriced, not available in the USA, or did not look all that sturdy in most cases. My research seemed to indicate that loft beds were quite common to be built by individuals instead of companies and that their primary market seems to be for college dorms, although these tend not to be built as sturdily as I would prefer. For these reasons, I decided that it might be an interesting project and I decided to build my own queen size loft bed.
Initially, I designed the bed such that it could be taken apart and moved when we eventually move to a new house. The more I worked on it, the more it seemed that the loft bed was not going to be moving with us. The work to disassemble and reassemble it would be nearly as much as building a new one from scratch, so I'm leaning towards donating it to the next owners of my house. It's been an interesting project and my daughter has already started designing one for her room, so it looks like this project is not going to be over anytime soon.
The next measurement that you will need to decide upon is the height of the mattress platform supports above the floor. This is going to tell you how much headroom that you will have while seated. Unless you are somewhat short, you will unlikely be able stand without bumping your head on the bottom of the loft platform. After the first few bumps, you will learn not to stand so straight. The determination of this height is a compromise between the height of the person seated at the desk and the amount of room that you desire to have for the person(s) sleeping on the loft. Although you will sink down somewhat into your mattress, you do not want the distance between the top of the mattress and the ceiling to be so small that you cannot turn over without your shoulder hitting the ceiling. Since I had gotten used to cramped berthing compartments during my time in the Navy, I had a pretty good feel for how close I could be to the ceiling before I would start feeling uncomfortable. If you are lucky enough to be working with a 9 or 10 ft ceiling, your compromises are considerably easier. For my design, I went with 60" for the distance from the floor to the bottom of the mattress platform supports, which gives me 21" from the top of the mattress to the ceiling. The 21" distance gives me nearly enough room to turn over in bed and not hit my elbow if it is fully extended. Surprisingly, this distance is also sufficient for one person to be atop another in a compromising position (preliminary testing has shown this possible, but extensive testing has yet to be completed).
Since the desktop is underneath a queen size bed, there is no reason to skimp on desktop space. Most commercial desks do not tend to be deep enough for computer use -- you end up with your keyboard being cramped off the front of the desk and it is too close to your monitor. Using four 2x10s for a desktop seemed to be about right -- it gives me a 37"x84" desktop. If I needed a little more room, I could have added another plank to the front or rear of the desktop or used 2x12s instead.
Since the idea of the loft was to have a computer work area underneath the mattress platform, I decided to wire it such so that I did not need a lot of power strips along the floor. I decided to go with an industrial theme in keeping with the loft concept and used galvanized steel outlet boxes, conduit, and faceplates. To ease the painting, it is advisable to install this after the rest of the loft unit has been painted.
This is what I originally planned for the outlets on the bottom of the desktop. This is the view as you lay underneath the desk with your feet towards the back wall / rear of the desk and your head towards the front of the desktop, looking up at it.
And this is the layout that Grace desires for situations where she might need to plug something in temporarily near the front of the desktop. On this diagram, the rear of the desktop is at the bottom of the page and it is being viewed as if you were laying underneath the desktop, looking upwards, with your head toward the front of the desk and your feet toward the rear of it.
Now, there is also the issue of the UPS... Due to frequent power glitches, drop outs, and even total power failures, I have a small UPS that gives me a few minutes to shut everything down gracefully. For most glitches and drop outs, power is restored before I need to shutdown. To prolong the operational time of the UPS, only the devices that might result in a data loss are put on the the UPS. The monitor and other devices can be protected by a normal surge protector instead. With the given layout of these plugs, it might be desirable to have them split between UPS protection and just surge protection. This could be accomplished by creating two circuits -- either a left and right circuit (simplest solution) or by staggering the circuit along the wire run. Since this would necessitate running two pieces of nomex inside the 1/2" conduit and since I am concerned with heat dissipation in such a situation, I have decide to go with a left and right circuit. If I had been running 3/4" conduit, I might have chosen the staggered circuit design.
Once I got around to wiring up the two power cords, I decided that it did not make sense to have 14-2 nomex and only 16-gauge wire in the pre-made power cords, so I decided to create my own with a 3-conductor 10-gauge cable that is even approved for submersed operations (not that I foresee such a need on a second floor room, but anything worth engineering is worth over-engineering). What I've probably accomplished here is to ensure that the limiting factor is not the wiring of the loft, but rather the wiring of the house.
Run the wiring before you enclose the mattress deck. This will enable you to run normal conduit through the 2x4s and not have to hide the nomex behind wooden trim pieces.
Choose a paint / finish that is currently in stock at your local hardware store. Switching brands in the middle of the project means you will likely have to redo the portions that you have already painted / finished. If you are using a stain instead of a paint, this is even more of an issue since one stain on top of another will unlikely give the same color as either stain on bare wood.
Although creating a desktop out of 2x10 lumber is acceptable, it is best to utilize a planer/joiner to square up the lumber before the glue-up. When you use pipe clamps and dowels to pull together lumber that is not quite straight, you need to exert a lot of pressure on the lumber. There is a chance that the glue-up will bend and you will have a slightly curved desktop. The main problem of not using a planer/joiner prior to the glue-up is that you will have grooves where the boards join. I you are planning on writing on the desktop without some sort of pad underneath your paper, you will have problems with your writing instrument sticking through the paper and getting stuck in the groove. This can be remedied by either putting some sort of solid surface (e.g. glass) where you intend to be writing or by proper joinery of the planks that are making up the desktop. The cost of 2x10 planks vs 3/4" plywood is not significantly more expensive and is quite a bit easier to transport if you do not have a truck, so for a little more effort in the glue-up, you can have a very sturdy desktop. If you decide to utilize 3/4" plywood, you will need to put a 1x2 edge piece along the plywood to hide the edge and to give it more support along the unsupported front edge. With the desktop made from 2x10s, it is sturdy enough on its own and you do not need to hide the edge. The desktop is strong enough to act as a second bed platform if the need arises, although it would most likely only hold a single size mattress.
Stay with the same type of stain / paint for the entire project. Switching from a latex to an oil-based paint seems to work, but it seems that you need to put more coats on to get full coverage without any streaking.
If you plan on putting 2-drawer file cabinets underneath the loft desktop, it is highly advisable that you make your desktop high enough to clear them. After I had nearly finished the loft, Grace decided that she would like to put a 2-drawer file cabinet underneath one side of the desktop. It turned out that the bottom of the desktop was not high enough, so either I will have to raise the whole loft by another inch or so or she will have to consider other storage ideas -- I prefer the latter solution for now.