DIY Motorized Loft Bed – A One-of-a-Kind Build for My Daughter!

This year for her birthday, the only thing my daughter wanted was a bedroom makeover, and the main thing she was looking for was a beachy loft bed with a desk underneath. So, I started planning and was happy to find this awesome video by Rogue Engineer that was the exact look that she was going for. The problem was that our second floor has 8 foot ceilings, so a loft bed that has enough room for her to sit up in bed has barely any room for even a 12 year old girl to get under, and definitely not enough room for her 40 year old dad. 

But I’m not exactly in the business of telling my daughter that I can’t make something work, so I came up with this motorized rising loft bed that leaves her plenty of room to sit up in bed, and with a simple press of a button also gives tons of headroom underneath.

I had originally planned to use two motorized standing desks and somehow synchronize the motors, but on Amazon I found this enormous standing table frame that said it could support table sizes up to 130” x 60” and could lift up to 352 pounds. Since a full bed in the US is 75”x 54” and my daughter weighs under 100 pounds, this thing definitely fit the bill.

I also picked up a simple metal bedframe for just over $40, which is way cheaper than I could build it on my own and saved me some weight over using wood. Day 1 of this project was all about figuring out how those two pieces were going to fit together properly.

I made some slight modifications to the standing desk frame by flipping one of the legs around so the motors would be on the same side, and I cut off the cantilevered supports on the front and back since I wanted the legs to be flush with the ends of the bed. Then I put bolts through the bedframe into the table frame until I felt confident that it wasn’t going anywhere.

After that, I got some measurements for how tall the bed needed to be for my daughter to sit up comfortably and built some simple framing out of 2 x 4 boards that I attached to studs on the back wall, and another floating section for the foot of the bed. Then I called in some help to get the bed lifted onto those two frames. After that I spent a little time centering the bed before locking it in place by building a 2×4 square in between the legs on both sides.

And then it was time for the first stability test. You can see the wall side was rock solid, but the floating side that was only connected to the wall on one side was for sure not sturdy enough, and thankfully my daughter had a sleepover that night because there’s no way she was sleeping in this bed at the end of Day 1.

At the start of Day 2 it was time to add some rigidity with stairs that I made out of ¾ birch plywood. I then marked the wall where the openings landed and cut 2 x 4’s to attach the stairs to walls from the top. The original plan was to put in some vertical dividers for the shelf to increase their strength, but after doing some testing it didn’t seem necessary, and the stairs were plenty rigid without them.

For the bottom of the bed and the ceiling of the loft I ended up using ½” plywood, but in hindsight I should have just used shiplap which would have been easier, more cost effective, and probably looked better. As Day 2 came to a close, I just needed to get a bedrail installed so my daughter had some place to sleep.

Day 3 was the start of more precision work where I needed to start worrying about how things were going to actually look and realized that my original design wasn’t going to allow me to conceal the motor on the foot of the bed. I decided I needed to cut about 3 inches off the wall with a circular saw, which is never fun, but was totally necessary to move forward.

After that, I felt a lot better about the vision for the rest of the bed. I made sure everything was square and started to make things look a bit nicer by adding some oak stair treads and I cut my first few pieces of shiplap. I also made sure to rough in plenty of electrical for LED lighting, light switches, and outlets above the bed for my daughter to charge her devices. Then after getting all that covered up, I spent a ton of time raising and lowering the bed to check for clearances before calling it a day.

Day 4 was basically an entire day of cutting shiplap. Since I didn’t want to make all that sawdust inside the house, I made quite a few trips up and down the stairs, 53 in fact, according to my Apple Watch. Nothing much else to see here, just a lot of shiplap.

Day 5 was my kind of day with trim and lighting going in and I love seeing that light at the end of the tunnel where it starts to feel like a more finished project. I went with 6” Govee RGBW downlights under the bed and 12V tunable white LED strips in each of the cubbies above the bed. Last, I relocated all the wiring to an accessible location under the mattress before buttoning up the shiplap on the back wall. I also installed a small removable partition wall that raises and lowers with the bed to hide the frame and wires when the bed is in its raised position.

On the start of Day 6, I filled about 1000 finish nail holes in the shiplap, then tagged in my wife and daughter to get the painting done, and I even helped a little. Then after the first coat, I went back and caulked all the large joints before my wife came back in for a second coat. I installed the LED strips into the stairs and after that it was just finishing touches like a simple desk from IKEA, a beanbag chair for her reading corner, and switching out the ceiling fan for something a little less dangerous, and the project was finished.

All in all, I think it came out great, and the most important thing is that my daughter loves it and it should be able to grow with her all the way through high school, right? No asking for another room makeover for at least a few years, okay?

If you made it to the end of the video, thanks for sticking around for something other than my normal review content, and I definitely appreciate the opportunity that I have to take a few days out of my normal schedule to build something cool for my daughter that she’ll hopefully remember for her whole life.  Merry Christmas, happy New Year, and as always, thanks for watching The Hook Up.