The Wedding Bed

This is the sweet little bedroom viewed from its lanai, through the french doors. On the rights, next to the wall, is the trap door. The trap door is about two feet by two feet, and goes under a very large support beam that effectively reduces that dimension somewhat. This matters when you want to bring anything bulky to the second level. Of course, having to heft anything bulky up into the treehouse to begin with can be daunting. And of course where it really mattered in terms of our honeymoon suite was the bed - how do you fit a queen sized bed through a hole like that?

During the building process, we anticipated hoisting the bed over the lanai, and left railing off the side for a long time to make that a bit easier. I'd go stand on the lanai and stare down at the trees, and wonder how the bed was ever going to make it into the bedroom.

One of our friends suggested an airbed, and we tried it for a bit. The airbed is easy to bring in and set up, but air naturally wants to find a way out. I have never met an airbed yet that kept its air. Being offgrid, the idea of having to keep the bed plugged in felt just plain wrong.

The kind of bed I really wanted up there was a memory foam kind, with a nice solid base. The memory foam folds and rolls so it readily brought through the trap door, but how to get a solid base in there? Would we build it in situ?

Looking at beds online, I found a modular bed. It came in segments that fit together, with a mattress cover zipped around the whole thing. Eureka! It for sure seemed worth ordering, as the memory foam would forgive whatever lacked in the modular system. Then from an entirely different source came the bedframe that doubled as a box spring that you assemble yourself.

And that is how we fit a queen sized bed with a nearly conventional underpinning through the trap door.