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Maximizing Bedroom Space in Homes with Large Families

Whether you have a large brood of your own at home, or are simply having family members from out of town coming to stay at your home with you, it can be quite tricky finding enough space for everyone.  Sure, you can pack a fair number of people into most homes, young and old, big and small, but fitting them all inside comfortably and providing all of them privacy makes matters much more difficult.  Generally, people can move about rather freely during the day throughout the living space, provided they know their manners and can wait their turn to use the bathroom.  However, when it comes to getting some shuteye, private space becomes all that much precious and valuable.
In order to maximize your available bedroom space so that everyone has a legitimate space to sleep (no sofa-crashing, bed-sharing, or sleeping bag-using here), you’ll need to get creative in your approach.  We’ll assume for convenience’s sake that the master bedroom is off-limits for everyone besides the homeowners, since most are reluctant to part with their own space and really shouldn’t have to anyway.

Using Bunk Beds

If there are an exorbitant number of people in your home (guests, immediate family members, or otherwise), simply passing out the available bedroom floor space isn’t going to cut it.  In many cases, you’ll need two beds for every current bed in you have in your home.  Fortunately, full over full bunk beds are two beds that take up the floor space for only one.  By utilizing twin over twin bunk beds in a conventionally-sized bedroom, you can comfortably sleep 4 kids, maybe even 6 if you have an exceptionally large kid’s room available.  Instead of sharing beds, which can cause numerous conflicts between children and eliminate their last shreds of privacy, bunk beds provide every kid with his or her own space.  Plus, you still get the advantage of children learning how to share, since one will have to be courteous to the other in order to avoid bed-shaking and other actions that could disturb the other sleeper.

Using Lofted Beds

For older children and visiting/non-homeowner adults, bunk beds are less appealing.  You may want to provide your older guests and children with extras such as desk space, their own dresser, and other such items as well, but you may not have the space to provide all those things.  If that’s the case, consider using loft beds.  Lofted beds are raised high above the floor, similarly to top bunks, just without the bottom bed.  Instead of a bottom bed, the space under the bed can be used to hold a desk, a dresser, a chair, and several other possible items.  College students in dorms tend to loft their beds to maximize their space, and using loft beds enables you to double the amount of furniture you can keep in a single room.  Just make sure your guests know to step out from under the lofted bed before standing up, as otherwise they’ll likely bump their heads on the underside of the beds.  Ouch!

Using Sleeper Sofas

In situations where there simply aren’t enough bedrooms available even after using all the aforementioned floor space-saving techniques, you’ll have to make your furniture work for you in more than one way.  Instead of your sofa just serving as day seating, it can also be turned into a bed.  For a single sleeper, one can always just lie down on the sofa as is, though that isn’t ideal.  For double sleepers such as visiting married couples, sharing a single sofa is impossible, unless of course you have a sofa that doubles as a pull-out bed.  Using a sleeper sofa, you can keep all your furniture usable during the day to everyone, but at night when everyone is about to head to bed, your sofa sleepers can simply pull out the stored bed and utilize the living space differently.  When you’ve exhausted all of the other available space in your home, it’s never a bad idea to find different uses for existing pieces of furniture, and finding sleep space for everyone in your home is no different.