The Mattress was Laid to Rest

In my previous post, I alluded to the "special circumstances" that allowed Trekker access to the nearly-always-off-limits space in our house where we (Casey and I) sleep: our bed.

It all started last December when Casey and I decided to upgrade our mattress. Well, maybe it started when we helped our pastor move, and we offered to dispose of his old king-sized mattress, which we later decided to keep for ourselves, for when we got married (this was about 6 months before our wedding).

The mattress itself was in pretty good shape when we received it; the problem came when we had to move it into our house. As with many older city homes, our house was not built with the intent of moving large furniture to the upper floor. In fact, when the time came to move the mattress upstairs, the only possible way  to get the mattress to our bedroom (apart from taking out the windows upstairs) was to fold it in half. As you can probably imagine, this feat, albeit successful, did not leave the mattress in the same condition in which we received it. But we made do--with a big lump in the middle of the bed where we had folded it. Still, it really wasn't that bad. We flipped it and rotated it around a few times until the biggest part of the lump was at the foot of the bed.

 

But after a year and a half of a lumpy mattress, it seemed like a worthwhile investment to purchase a non-lumpy mattress. We got a great deal on a Sleep Number mattress, and with help from our parents, got an early Christmas gift for ourselves.

So we moved the old mattress out. It only got this far...

...before we decided it would be fun to leave the mattress in the living room for a while and have a comfy place to watch movies over the holidays, when Casey and I had some time off of work at the same time.

We moved the mattress down to the living room at the beginning of our Stay-cation, around Dec. 27th, I think. We thought we would keep it there for a couple of days, just as a fun treat.

The problem was that it WAS fun. A little too much fun. We had a sleepover on New Year's Eve, where we slept on the mattress downstairs and watched movies all night. And, of course, Trekker was allowed to sleep on the mattress with us, as the mattress was "trash" (now that we had folded it in half twice--once to get it up the stairs, and then to get it back down the stairs--it had become pretty worthless as a sleeping accoutrement).

A couple of weeks later, the mattress was still in our living room. Aside from the tackiness of having a mattress in our living room, the mattress caused several other inconveniences:

•  The mattress was so very large that, when laid flat on the living room floor, it took up all of the floor space from the edge of the couch to the entertainment center. Thus, we couldn't walk through the living room without walking across the mattress. We fixed this problem by leaning the mattress up against the couch at an angle (see picture above).
• The mattress was so comfortable that we inevitably spent periods of time as much as 12-15 hours in a day just lying around on the mattress, watching TV (mostly football), reading, napping...(see picture of me and Trek, taken after church one Sunday).
• We found that when we slept overnight with Trekker on the mattress, Trekker slept much later into the morning, and was not nearly as whiny upon waking, which allowed us to sleep longer and with fewer interruptions.
• The mattress took up so much room in the house that it proved to be a rather significant deterrent to house-cleaning. So...we didn't clean our house between Dec. 24th and the day we got rid of the mattress.

We talked about needing to get rid of the mattress just about every other day following New Year's, but our conversations usually ended with, "Oh, but it would be nice to have the mattress for..." and still the mattress stayed.

The cleaning inconvenience was really the final motivator that ended the mattress-in-the-living-room era.

After many lazy Sundays, slumber parties, and late-night movies, the mattress was laid to rest on Wednesday, Jan. 26th, 2011 (only a month post-mattress switch). Casey and I honored it with a burial ceremony that included dragging it through the snow and into the back alley, where we jumped on it one last time (and talked about how awkward it was to lie on a mattress in the middle of an alley). Now it sits behind our dumpster and patiently awaits large-item pick-up.

And we have our house back--and clean again!