Kid bedroom redo

My dear little boy turns into a teenager next week. Whoa. I know people say this all the time, but how the heck did that happen? I can remember thinking shortly after my divorce that having to be the only parent to him during the times I had him was going to be so very hard. Now we've done it this way for twice as long as he was in a two parent home, and I think things are going pretty well.

When I moved into this little house in a great location, it was listed as a two bedroom house, but the second "bedroom" was the old back porch, which had been added at some point after the house was built. I had someone come in, bump out the back porch area by a few feet and made that area into a conforming bedroom.

It has served Mr W well. He spends most of this time in the living room anyway, since that's where his computer is. But he's been wanting to change things around in his room, so I've taken to Pinterest to look for ideas. His room is very small - 7.5' by about 10', which means we can fit a bed along the short side, but not much else. The ceiling is kind of low as well.

This is what he's got now (please excuse the mess):

He's got a loft bed with space for a chair underneath that he rarely uses. To my left out of the frame is a book case.

While looking at Pinterest, I came across this really neat design, with a bed on a simple low frame with wheels. The bed slides under a platform when not in use, and there's desk space on top. How clever is that? I've looked around, and it seems this is a custom thing. I can buy the frame with the wheels, but am having trouble finding a twin bed sized platform that we could make into that desk space.

But while I'm looking, I come across the website for the company that I bought his loft bed from in the first place. They have this:

This looks kind of like what we have now. This looks like kind of what we have now, with the legs cut shorter. Hey! 

So my clever idea now is to repurpose his existing bed so we can put a desk on top of it. Cut some length off the bottom of the legs, take the ladder off, make it longer by replacing the 2 x 6's with longer ones so the bed slides underneath, and put another full piece of plywood on the top to support a chair and desk. I can probably take the existing railings off and replace them with something a little more open like is shown in the top picture. It's all narrow enough that we'll have to put the desk area at either the head or the foot of the bed, as opposed to along the length of it, but that's totally doable, too. Maybe I'll even paint it...

If this works, it will be much cheaper than having to get new stuff. I wasn't looking forward to having to find a new home for his old bed anyway.