Families can be transient during summer, moving from one relative to the next, sharing a meal and some stories from the good old days. I like having people to stay, but because we live in a small house all we've been able to offer in the way of a guest room is a couple of squabs on the lounge floor. When I was in my 20s, dossing down seemed just fine, but now I'm in my 40s, this is beginning to seem a little inadequate. I had a cousin stay last year and he had just ridden the Wellington to Auckland Cycle Classic, so I did feel a bit bad that I'd managed to give him his least salubrious lodgings.
Coinciding with my desire to provide a comfortable stay for my guests, I had materials left over from the deck I'd just finished. So I've vacated my office (which is in a garage we lined a few years ago) to turn it into guest lodgings.
The first thing I did, after I cleared it out, was construct a bed. Because I've used decking, it's a slat bed. I used the squabs as a guide for size, which means I've essentially joined two single beds together. I thought that was logical when I started, but as it turns out, that makes for a massive bed. So my first bit of advice is to figure out how big a mattress, sheets and blankets you're using and build it to that.
This design is also easy to adapt to two single beds. Best of all, it was only about a four-hour project. I've painted the structural part of the bed, made out of the leftover decking materials, and wrapped it in a 20mm thick, 300mm wide piece of marine ply, which I had cut for me at Bunnings.