Combining Love Seat and Sofa to make a Queen Bed

We have a 3124KB (a 3023 would be similar) with three kids, and while our youngest is short enough we've been letting her sleep in the love seat, thus giving each kid their own bed. However, that will eventually end when she is too tall to fit the space. When that comes, we've been scheming to bridge the gap between the deployed sofa-bed and the love seat, turn the kids ninety degrees and this might give the kids an equivalent to a queen sized bed. The back cushions to the Love Seat are just the right height to bridge the gap (although there is an angle to them so they won't lay flat), and initially I thought I'd have to build something to fit the space.

We were playing around with our 50 qt cooler (a family of five needs more food storage than a 2.7 cu ft refrig) this past week at Boyd Lake St Park and we discovered that while it isn't long enough for a stable base, it's about the right height to lay the cushions out. We then went to a couple of stores and figured out that if we get two of these:

http://www.amazon.com/Igloo-Wheelie-...6850398&sr=8-1

or there is a similar sized Coleman that we saw at the outlet store (the body of the 40 qt wheeled cooler but with a shorter lid that they market as a 34 qt cooler, and I can't find it on Amazon). The Coleman looks to be short enough that it will slide under the deployed sofa bed, and I could use a piece of plywood to bridge them to make a better platform. The Igloo is a little taller so I think they would not slide under the bed.

Has anyone tried anything like this? I'm curious if anyone has opinions or ideas. It looks like this will give us a queen in addition to the king and twin on the ends, which would give us more space for the kids to spread out, or extra space for if the kids ever invite friends. And it would be very temporary, using stuff we need to drag along anyway (i.e. coolers), so we wouldn't have to do it all the time.

Mark

[mbd4kids]

We have not tried this, but my 13 year old was recently suggesting making the "big" bed. Please let me know how it works out if you do it. I already have one of these coolers...what's one more! Good Luck!

We just bought two of the 34 Qt Coleman coolers from the Outlet store, and at a first glance it looks like the only possible issue may be that it's a hair shorter than the loveseat/sofa so that the cushions angle down a little on the top of the cushions. However, we think we can come up with a way to level it out (it's not like the pull out sofa-bed is exactly level in the first place), a 1x4 in the worst case but we should be able to some up with something lighter weight.

We're going to Mueller St Park this weekend with the Trailblazers, so we'll be goofing around with it to see how it can work. I'll give you an update when we get back.

Mark