Choosing side cabinets for a Murphy bed

Pick the style for what goes in it

Every side cabinet has the same top and sides; the style is what fills the bottom 28″ of it. There are four:

• Three drawers. Clothes, linens, anything you’d fold. The drawers pull all the way out, run on ball bearings, are rated for 100 pounds and close softly.
• Doors. Doors with a shelf behind them, for things you’d rather not see. The hinges close softly, and a clip stops each door at 86° so it opens wide without hitting the bed or the wall.
• Drawer over doors. One drawer for the small things, with doors underneath.
• Open shelves. No doors or drawers at all: open, with one shelf that moves up and down. Books, baskets, a lamp.

Tall or low

A tall cabinet stands as tall as a vertical bed: 82-1/8″ beside a Twin or Full, 87-1/8″ beside a Queen or King. Over the drawers or doors it has a fixed shelf at 28″, then open shelves that move up and down, and a trim rail across the top like the bed’s, so the tops line up. It comes with 3 of those open shelves, and you can choose anywhere from 1 to 5.

A low cabinet is 28″ tall: the same bottom part with a finished top and nothing above it. It’s the usual match for a horizontal bed, and it leaves the wall above it clear for a window or a picture.

By default a cabinet matches its bed, but any height can stand beside any bed. A low cabinet beside a vertical bed, or a tall one beside a horizontal bed, is fine.

How wide to go

The stock widths are 18″, 21″, 24″, 27″, 30″, 33″. Any width in between, to the sixteenth of an inch, can be ordered on a side cabinet’s page with the custom width option, and it is built at exactly that width. Nothing narrower than 18″ or wider than 33″; past that it’s two cabinets side by side.

That last sixteenth is often what makes a wall work. Measure the wall first, take off the bed’s cabinet, and split what’s left between the cabinets.

Add it up before you order

Add the bed’s cabinet width to every side cabinet you want, and check the total against the smallest wall width you measured. How to measure for a Murphy bed walks through taking that number, and lists every bed’s width.

You can put up to three cabinets on each side of the bed. Each one is screwed to the studs through its hang rail, like the bed. Drywall alone will not hold a loaded cabinet.

They match the bed

A side cabinet is cut from the bed’s own 3/4″ plywood and finished in the bed’s color: painted maple, stained white oak, or unfinished, whatever the bed is. Its pulls are the same T-bar as the bed’s, in the bed’s metal, on a smaller pull, one to each door and drawer.

A cabinet with doors or drawers is 16-19/32″ deep, so its fronts stand a little past the side of the bed, by the thickness of one front. That’s by design. Open shelves have no fronts, so they sit flush with the bed.

Two ways to order them

The easiest is on the bed’s own page, under Add-ons: the cabinets take the bed’s color, pulls and height on their own, and a bed with its cabinets is planned as one job, so it gets the order-together savings. Start from the Murphy beds.

Or buy one on its own from the side cabinets, and pick the width, the height, the color and the pulls yourself.

Questions we get