If you know me, you may know something of my troubled love affair with life in San Francisco, and that I had to move back "home" to Austin, Texas last year and stay with some friends after having trouble finding people to accept my rent money for most of the prior year.  I worked pretty hard to save up a few bucks and worked out a plan to move back, stayed in weekly hotels for a couple of months with my girlfriend, and ended up in an extra room at my friends' house.  We're not in the best of neighborhoods, this is the smallest, most highly populated room in the house, and sharing a twin aerobed and using an ottoman for a desk was just not working out - something had to be done!

A few weeks ago I decided that an ideal solution would be a loft bed - a bed that sits on top of a platform - which I could sit at a desk under.  This, I decided, would help my girlfriend and I to keep different schedules without interfering with the other's sleep or daily chill time, and would make the room feel almost twice its' size.  I looked around on websites of various mass manufacturers, asked the all-knowing Google, and ended up finding a guy southeast of Napa who custom build this type of bed after the experience of actually purchasing some mass market bunk beds for his kids.

In addition to being a lot sturdier, the beds are made from simple, cheap Kiln-dried construction-quality wood, and a Queen size starts at USD$299, easy to triple in addons like shelves, a desk, a front-facing ladder, etc..  In comparison to the approximately $1000 I spent, I would have had to spend nearly twice that for something smaller on the mass market.  Awesome!  I put in my order and sent a payment directly out of my girlfriend's bank account using a PayPal eCheck, which cleared before he had time to start on my bed.

Less than a month later, after taking lots of pictures of the inside of my room, thrice-measuring dimensions, mulling over placement, and changing my mind on various things, Tom and his brother came to install the bed and secure it to the wall for me - SF being SF.  In the three weeks leading up to the install, I also chose a nice, lower-mid-range LCD HDTV which was delivered overnight by Amazon for $1.99 over the cost, which undercut local stores by hundreds of dollars.  I also forked out for a rotating and tilting wall mount, which the guys helped me to hang when they brought the bed, though I had to flip it the next day because it was upside-down - we did all this very late, heh.

Also, in the past couple of weeks I was able to recover a treasure from my own ancient world, a beautiful SGI 1600SW - the first ever Digital Flat Panel - and an original "MultiLink" converter to DVI so that I can hook it up to my MacBook Pro.  I purchased this comboalong with an O2 graphics workstation, about two years ago, and a friend has stored them while I was in Tejas and until we could find a MultiLink.  Serendipitously, less than a week before the bed's delivery, I came across a MultiLink on Craigslist which I walked about ten blocks to pick up for a fraction of what they run on eBay.

All in all, the new setup is really awesome, and I'm able to work while my girlfriend and two or three roommates watch TV.  I took a few pictures for the guys who made the bed, before for design purposes, and after for advertising purposes, so I'll share them here.  I don't have a tripod, so they are a bit fuzzy from my hands shaking - it turns out the harder you try to hold still, the more violently your hands shake.  Some of them are decent from setting the camera on a chair back or something, but in a room this small it's necessary to get near the floor and in the corner to see anything in a picture other than flat walls.  Anyway, here they are.