June 28, 2012

The High Cost of Being Cheap

Let me introduce you to our new mattress.  But first, let's say good-bye to the old mattress, which isn't old at all, because it's barely six months old.

The old mattress was something of an impulse buy. We needed a new mattress, because our really old one was close to 15 years old.  Close to 15 years old, but not over.  I know that, because we've haven't been married 15 years quite yet (that's coming next month) and we definitely bought the mattress after we were married.

There's a really long story attached to how we bought ourselves a new mattress sometime after the wedding.  Let me just say it involves an ice cooler worth of loose change, and a trip out to Vegas. Sometimes I'm amused by this story, but more often these days, the story makes me want to punch my husband.

This mattress-via-Vegas story was lurking there in my mind, when we went to purchase a new mattress for Lily's loft bed.  The last few times we've needed a mattress (for kids graduating from crib to bed, and for a guest bed), we've gone to a discount mattress store up the freeway.  It's a little hole in the wall place, and the owner is definitely of the sleazy salesman variety, but there's something sort of harassed-but-charming about him too. 

Long story shorter, the salesman worked us hard to buy not just a full-sized mattress for Lily, but also a new queen for me and the husband.  The husband needed some convincing -- he wanted to wait, research, take it slow. Me, I was in it for revenge.  Let's just buy the damn mattress, I muttered under my breath.  Hokay-fine, he agreed in the end.  We laid on several mattresses, tested them out for a minute or two. We found one that felt pretty good.

And we brought it home that day.
For the first couple of weeks, it was fine.  Better! An improvement! But after a month, we noticed it was sagging. Badly. And that I was sort of...rolling into the pit growing on my husband's side of the bed.  And that it was really hard to get out of the darn thing every morning...but not in a good "can't get out" way.  More like, I was stuck.
  "For the best sleep ever," it says. Um, no.

All this happened back in late November.  It's taken us until now, after putting a couple of wooden boards between the mattress and box spring, after putting a pillow under my husband's side of the mattress, after mornings of his popping Advils for his ribcage/back pain and nights of dreading going to bed, after me waking with a stiff and aching lower back on many mornings -- after all this, we finally broke down and bought a new, quality mattress last week.

We laid down for a long time, testing each possible mattress.  We went to three different stores.  The husband did his due-diligence research.  

Last week, this was delivered:
It's by Sealy Posturepedic. It's nice and firm and tight and comes with a guarantee that we can exchange it after 30 days (for a re-stocking fee) if it proves not to be the right match.  But so far, so good.  Ah, sleep.

This may not have been the most interesting or glamorous home improvement post.  But it was a very necessary purchase.  Because as it turns out, you need your sleep.  I felt bad for twisting my husband's arm and "making" him buy the old mattress.  He says not to feel bad -- that he agreed to it too, in the end.  I also think that if he hadn't been such a cheapskate almost 15 years ago, with his loose sock change in a cooler in the trunk in a variety of Vegas casinos (back when they had penny slots!) we could've avoided this whole mattress drama.  But alas, a woman's memory is long.

On the bright side I think I'm totally over that incident now, some almost-15-years down the road.  And hopefully our new mattress will be around for many years of marital bliss.

Wait. What?  That sounds nasty.  You know what I mean. 
On Thursdays I'm linking up with Jules at Pancakes and French Fries as part of her 2012 William Morris Project.

13 comments :

  1. Well, a good marriage is always made better by a good mattress!

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    1. Then I believe we may be entering the best years of our lives! :-)

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  2. We also bought a mattress from a creepy hole in the wall place, the owner looked like Steve Buscemi's tattooed younger brother. It came with a 10 year 'warrantee' against sagging, we shall see. Good sleep is like gold around here.

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    1. Ha, love the description of your salesman. It was a big red flag that our warranty/registry card didn't actually have an address for the company...and looking it up online revealed nothing about them.

      Good luck, hope yours lasts!

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  3. We bought a new mattress 2 years ago, replacing our 10 year old sagging,nightmare, behemoth. I was astonished that I actually began to roll out of bed without back pain (I thought I was just getting old), and that the new mattress didn't slump over to my husband's side. It was a revelation! A good night's sleep makes everything better.

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    1. Yep, it sure does! It's still very new, but I've been falling asleep much more quickly than usual since we got it.

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  4. I dread mattress buying. Screw up on this one and you are suffering for a good long while. 12 yrs of sleeping (sort of) on a mattress that was wayyy too hard for me and I learned my lesson!

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    1. Mattress buying is so confusing...they switch model names from store to store, so you can't easily compare. And you're right, you're stuck with your choice most of the time!

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  5. This has me wondering if my back pain is partially due to our mattress--bought at Best Buy. Loved your story, too--yeah, our memories are long, huh? :-)

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    1. Thanks, Rita -- yep, sometimes life would be SO much easier if I could erase some of my long memories. Or just move past them.

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  6. Thanks for posting this! The hub and I are planning to get a new mattress in a couple months (we are upgrading a queen-size--watch out!) and I need to read as many horror stories as possible so that I don't cave and buy a cheapo! How firm is your new mattress. I like a really hard one. The best night's sleep I ever got was on a thick-carpeted floor.:)

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    1. This one is a mix of firm mattress, softened a bit by the pillow top. But we did lay on some REALLY firm ones. We learned the hard way that extra soft/extra cushy pillow top is not for us.

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  7. I hope the new bed is wonderful and provides many great nights of sleeps in the future! We've had one of those creepy place mattresses for about 12 years now. It's definitely time for a replacement. Since we're moving to a smaller place, we will be using our 4 year old barely ever used guest bed. It is so amazingly comfortable. I'm SO looking forward to sleeping on it soon! :)

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Thanks for commenting! :)

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