Under Bed Storage

As a student, I have a pretty small room, so every little space is used to store something.
When I started a new project I had no place to put it, so I decided to search for new space to store all my stuff.
What I found, was a lot of space under the bed, the only problem was that it was inaccessible. The solution is a hydraulic spring system to lift the bed for easy acces of the storage space underneath it.
The best thing of it is that I now have about 3 extra square meters to store things!

Furthermore this is also a great place to hide things when you go away for some time.
A while ago we have had some burglars in our home, they looked everywhere. But I don't think they will look under a bed, especially when there seems to be no place for storage boxes...

To build the spring system for my bed I used some scrap materials that I had laying around.
My goal was not to make a nice looking construction, but to make it functional.

The following materials are used:

• Plywood (18mm)
• Screws
• 2 Gas springs (from the backdoor of a car)

I have a bed frame which consists of two separate slatted frames, so the first thing I needed to do was connect them together and make one strong frame of it.

First of all I made two trapezium shaped parts (see the illustration) of thick plywood to connect the two frames, preventing it from bending when only one of the two is lifted.

When I connected the frames I also added some metal strips to connect the two frames.
I also could have used bolts to connect them, but I decided to do it this way because I did not have bolts laying around.

To easily lift the matrass and slatted frame of the bed, gas springs are installed.

I used two L-shaped blocks of wood, over which I placed another layer of plywood to protect the spring from falling to the side.
Advantage of this method is that it is not needed to make any changes to te springs.
When lifting the slatted frame, the springs can just put put in the right place. After that, the frame is lowered a bit and the springs hold themselves in place.

To prevent the bed from tilting when the matrass is pushed down again, hinges of some sort need to be added.
One could think of hinges that connect both the bed frame and the slatted frame on the side you don't want to open.

Because I had no hinges I thought of a simple way to do this with wood. The only import thing is to prevent the bed from tilting upwards as can be seen in the illustration. Therefore I installed angled metal brackets.
The construction of this mechanism needs to be very strong, because the forces the gas spring produces are pretty big!

The result was better than I could have hoped for. You only need a little force at the start of opening the bed storage. The second half the springs do all the work.
When closing, some power is needed, but again the last half goes without any heavy lifting.

To complete this instructable, a small video of the bed storage in use!