Underbed storage is challenging
We have a combination sort of bed - it's a futon frame, with a big futon, and then a foot-deep foam layer, followed by an amazingly thick feather mattress (I found this bit of luxury for only 30 dollars at Goodwill). This bed is as far from a boring futon as you can get! We call this bed a 'nest' and we sleep like the dead. :)
Storagewise, there's very little room under a futon frame. We did use a thin underbed bin, but pretty much we just jammed whatever would fit in there, making organization challenging and retrieval most difficult.
A bed lift was in order
We wanted the highest possible bed lifts. There are nice wooden ones, made in various stains to match your bed's actual wood, if it has a wood frame. We saw those kinds in Bed, Bath and Beyond, four for $20. We did want something to add more inches, though, and we didn't want to have to buy two kits, since a futon frame has six legs instead of the usual four.
We settled on a set of plastic bed lifts made by Bed, Bath and Beyond themselves. They are black polypropylene, four for only $10. We were able to buy two separate lifts at $2.50 each so we could have our six bed supports. These lifts added five inches to our bed!
We were even able to crawl under our bed and organize things. This actually, along with our multitudes of mattresses, brings our little nest up to normal bed height, which I appreciate. I like getting down off my bed, rather than having to "get up" to get up in the morning.
Think how much extra room this would provide to a regular (ie - non-futon) bed that is already reasonably off the ground!
What to do with all that extra space
Best categories of things for the under bed space include items you don't need to access on a daily basis:
- out of season clothes - especially the bulky stuff
- picnic items
- sleeping bags, tents and other camping gear
- extra blankets, extra pillows
- extra first aid supplies or excess toiletries in a bin (this is very useful if your home, like mine, lacks a linen closet)
- guest linens
- dog grooming supplies in a basket
- ready-to-grab Disaster Planning Kit or any emergency supplies. There can even be a kit under every bed, for every family member in the home.
The black casters we used are not incredibly attractive, so you might be happier with the wooden ones that are available. My solution - add a bed skirt, craft some cute leg skirting yourself, or just make sure you have long bed blankets that drape down and hide the legs. It's very worth it to us, to have this extra usable space in our tiny apartment! If we could have found bed lifts made of recycled plastic content, this product would have been even better.
This bed lift set from Amazon is very similar to the ones we are using. I also included a link to some nice under-bed storage boxes (they have a cool blue and white pinstripe that looks like vintage mattress ticking; you can see the print in the the larger picture at Amazon). These boxes are recyclable:
