October 10, 2020 - Sofa Bed Project in Marge

Today I tore into the project of taking out the very uncomfortable sofa sleeper mechanism and replacing it with a storage box.  Here is a picture of the sleeper with the bed pulled out. 

The mattress and springs consists of a four inch foam rubber mattress on top of a stretched material attached to the sides with springs. Here is a picture of the "springs".

Needless to say, it is very uncomfortable. Copying what my friend Bob did to make his RV sleeper-sofa more comfortable, several years back I cut 5/8 inch thick pieces of plywood to fit over the black stretched material to firm up the mattress base. The plywood had to be hinged in several places to be able to fold it all back into the sofa. Here is a picture. You can see in the picture that there is a definite hump in the middle at the nearest hinge line. This is just the way the mechanism was made and no easy way to adjust it to take the hump out.

In an effort to address the "hump problem" earlier this year I made a track out of a 2 x 4 for the leg in the foot area to sit in, thus raising it up that end. While that did take out the hump sleepers then had to sleep with their head at the foot end because the whole bed went downhill toward the sofa. While that was no big deal the bed still remained extremely uncomfortable. I think this is primarily because the four inch foam mattress is a joke and crushes down to nothing. I didn't want to spend a sizeable chunk of money for the purchase of a new mattress, when it may not help that much. Additionally the sofa-sleeper is just not used that much. I decided to take the entire metal sofa-sleeper mechanism out and replace it with a wooden box that would support the sofa cushions for seating. Here is the metal mechanism taken out and headed for the recycle center.

It wasn't too bad to get out. There were eight screws on each side attaching it to the arms. I was glad that all four sides of the upholstered part of the sofa were screwed together as a unit with good wooden corner brackets.  Here is a picture of the box I made repurposing the plywood from the mattress project.

I couldn't build the box to go all the way back to the wall for more storage because there are two floor vents back there that provide air circulation to the basement storage area.  Here is a picture showing the vents.

I cut the top plywood so that it overlapped the box on all four sides for support when sitting on the sofa. The box is 63 inches wide and the cushions needed some additional support in the middle. I installed three 1 x 2 boards across with each being supported by a block.  Here is a picture.

I made the top out of 1/2 plywood I had in the shop. Quarter inch plywood would have been plenty strong but 1/2 inch plywood is what I had. Originally I was going to hinge the top for accessing the storage area but decided just laying it there with blocks to hold it place was a lot easier. I cut two hand holes to lift it out. Here is a picture.

Here is the sofa after the project was completed. It looks exactly as it did before but now affords us some storage area where we will store a more comfortable blowup mattress for use when we have guests.

This project has been bugging me for some time so I'm glad I got it completed. 

In looking up my paperwork I found that the tires on Marge were installed in April of 2015 after I had the cap come off one tire in Florida causing $1,800 damage. I'm sure their manufacture dates are several months older than the install date. This means I need to order new tires even though they look like new and probably only have about 12,000 miles on them. They are sixteen inch fourteen ply tires and are not cheap.