Mesh Bedside Item Pocket

In the Spring of 2018, I had a problem. I was living in an on-campus residence hall at MS&T, and I had lofted my bed to gain few extra square feet of precious floor space. Unfortunately, that floor space came at the cost of convenience. With my bed lofted, anything I took up with me had to be ferried back down later.

This was an issue for me, because I had developed a habit of reading my preferred news publication or checking my email while sitting in bed. Additionally, when I knew I’d be reading for a while, I would often decide to retire to the soft comfort of my mattress and escape the confining rigidity of my university-supplied chair. That luxury was mostly lost when I lofted my bed and found myself perched on high with my head nearly scraping the ceiling.

Carrying things down a ladder is often much more perilous than carrying them up, not to mention significantly more inconvenient. Thus, if something needed to escape the thin air at the summit of Mt. Bed, my options were: either carry it down the same way it went up, or drop it down and risk its destruction upon the unyielding floor below. I didn’t really want to take the time necessary to carry things back down, and I really didn’t want to risk breaking anything. The situation was clearly untenable, since, as any university student can attest, repeated inconvenience is terrible monster that loves to devour time and patience. Something had to be done.

That’s where the idea for a bedside storage system started. Originally, it was going to be a plywood shelf that would be just large enough for a book or my phone, fastened to the bedframe through a combination of hook-and-loop straps and 3D-printed components. I really liked the idea of a shelf, but, when I considered my space restraints and the tools I had access to at the time, I realized I might run into problems building it. Eventually, I concluded that a shelf would impractical to build.

Instead, I decided to borrow the family sewing machine and construct a pouch that would hang from the bedframe. I could still build a shelf when I had access to more resources, but a pouch would take far less time to construct and I knew I could make it with the tools I had at my disposal. When I had decided on the design-critical features, I sketched out my plans and ordered supplies.

Construction of the item pocket went very smoothly. I encountered my share of unforeseen setbacks, as I would with any project, but I was still able to sew everything together in a single afternoon despite the issues. In my opinion, I encountered only two problems that were serious enough to warrant mentioning:

First, after sewing everything into place, I found that I had inadvertently sewn on the reinforced backing upside-down. The reinforced backing was a strip of 1/2″ wide aluminum strap, cut to length and sewn into a sleeve of black polyester climbing webbing. It was intended to provide rigidity to one side of the pocket so I’d never have any issues with floppiness while attempting to store something. Sewing it on upside-down made the pocket ever-so-slightly too small for my laptop to fit inside, which was unfortunate, but I never really used my laptop while sitting in bed anyway. I had included the capability to store my laptop as a convenience, but it was never one of the design-critical features.

Second, I discovered that sewing machines don’t sew very well through hook-and-loop strips that are backed with industrial adhesive. I hadn’t intended to buy the type of hook-and-loop with adhesive backing, but, when I realized I’d purchased the wrong thing, I didn’t see it as an insurmountable issue. For those of you who have never been foolhardy enough to attempt sewing adhesive-backed hook-and-loop to something, allow me to save you some headache. It will barely work. The sewing machine needle will start out nice and sharp but very quickly will become coated adhesive residue. From there, the needle won’t stay nice and sharp for long.

I gave up trying to sew the hook-and-loop into place after my sewing machine needle snapped while trying to force its way through some adhesive-backed fuzz. In the end, I decided to use the adhesive backing to just stick the hook-and-loop onto the straps and call it a day. I had homework to do, and I didn’t feel like spending wrestling with it for another hour. The adhesive by itself didn’t feel nearly as secure as I would have liked it to be, so I improvised and added two large safety pins as shear rods to ensure that the straps wouldn’t slide around.

I used the beside item pocket heavily for two semesters, and it didn’t once break or come loose. I could be confident that whatever I wanted to store in there overnight would be secure from harm, while being conveniently close at hand. Project well done.