New Bed!

Our home improvement project of assembling new bookcases for my comic book collection got finished a couple of weeks ago – I now have three 8-foot-tall bookcases (yes, anchored to the wall to guard against earthquakes) holding my collection, replacing the four 6-foot-tall cases. Overall the new cases have slightly more shelf space, so I have a little extra room, and they’re in better condition and look nicer than the 15-year-old things they’re replacing.

But the real reason for installing them is to make more space in the bedroom (yes, my collection is in the bedroom), in order to buy a new bed.

The old bed was also 15 years old, a queen-sized mattress and box spring, and has been on its last legs for a while. We’d actually started wearing through the mattress’ covering, exposing some of the foam. Well, last weekend Debbi talked to her friend Lisa, whom we learned bought a new bed that weekend, and from whom we also learned that that weekend – Labor Day weekend – is the time of the deepest sales in the mattress business. So we headed out to Sleep Train to try out mattresses.

Well, long story short, we bought a new California-king-sized mattress and box spring. Long story slightly longer, there are a lot of different mattresses out there. We lay on about 7 of them, and actually liked the one we bought more than several higher-end ones. Though I knew anything we bought would be much nicer than the one we were replacing.

Also, this just in: Mattresses are expensive!

So yesterday the new bed was delivered. They gave us a 4-hour window for delivery, and arrived near the very beginning of it. The two guys came in, removed the old mattress, assembled the new frame, and put the new mattress and bed spring on it all in about 20 minutes. Amazing, really! We spent about half an hour before they arrived vacuuming under the old mattress (I think most of what I sucked up was Jefferson hair), and another 15 minutes or so removing picture frames from the stairwell walls so they wouldn’t damage anything while carrying the thing up. But it was finished in a whirlwind of activity. (I gave the movers some water while they were there, which they both sucked down. Debbi observed that most people probably don’t offer them anything.)

In addition to being larger, the bed is also taller than the old bed, which means I’ll need to move the shelf mounted on the wall above the bed. But other than adjusting to that, the bed is really nice and comfortable, and it’s much harder for us to feel the other person moving around on it (which should help keep Debbi from waking up when I roll around at night, active sleeper that I am).

Newton has instantly claimed the bed as his own space, snoozing on it even before we put the blankets on it, and curling up with us last night. Debbi noted that the old bed has smelled like him and his brother for years, so he might be trying to make this one smell like him. I said to him that this is the second bed I’ve bought in his lifetime. He really seems to like it.

Last night’s sleep was very comfortable.