There once was a mattress that swallowed three other mattresses. It lives in our bedroom.
In the few instances when our friends have traipsed to Brooklyn to see us, and have taken the three second tour, they've made more than a handfull of comments about the hight of our bed. Yes, friends, it does require me to jump into it.
I understand it would be preferential to sleep in a bed that did not require stairs, so we're going to fix this.
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| Our current mattress and the other mattresses it has eaten. |
Since our bed wasn't made by a mass retailer and was instead made by a very nice family friend named
Jeff Karges, we needed to take the current bed construction into consideration before devising a plan to eliminate the need for a pajamaed pole vault.
We currently have a large box spring sitting atop several beams of wood, pictured here.
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| Ready for mattress bypass surgery. |
We're looking to eliminate one of the mattresses our mattress swallowed: the box spring. Aaron wasn't keen on ditching the box spring and plopping the mattress directly onto the five slats, so we decided to create a new structural system for the bed, one more befitting of direct mattress contact.
We decided to use Ikea, both having had Ikea beds in the past that never collapsed in their three year tenure, and I'm a strong believer in "so far so good."
Ikea's bed frames all look like this.
There's a central beam that runs down the middle, and two metal rails that run along the sideboards, both of which hold up a series of wooden slats (not pictured). The result is a support system that rivals putting your mattress on the floor, which is Plan B.
We first needed to head to Home Depot to get a better drill. Our current battery-powered drill can't even handle Ikea pre-drilled holes, which is a low bar, let me tell you.
Home Depot is like the Land of Oz for Aaron, and our first stop was to see the wizard, Bill, who works in the drill aisle. Bill shunned cordless drills, in favor of drills that "get the job done." We took his advice, and went with his favorite, a $54.00 DeWalt.
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| Our new Marvin The Martian ray-gun. |
Feeling successful, we wrapped up our trip in the screws aisle, since those make drills extra useful.
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| So many choices! |
Off to Ikea to pick up the structural components; the bar and the slats. We hit the showroom and review our options.
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| What makes IKEA even more fun for Aaron? Posing for pictures at IKEA. |
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| Slats and bar secured! |
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| This looks unsafe. |
We got home, ready to go. Drill: check! Existing bedframe: check! New bar and slat support system: check! Screws: check!
Thing that the bar clips into,
not check. See, there is this wittle itsy bitsy piece that makes this whole program work, and it is this one.
It isn't sold separately from an Ikea bed, and since we don't have one of those, we don't have two of these. The flaw of the project is revealed.
Aaron emailed Ikea, asking if they would be so kind as to send us these replacement pieces (of the bed we don't own). Ikea said no, since we didn't have a receipt for the bed (a detail). So we begged, and are waiting to see how that goes.
As a back up plan, Ikea does sell
this bed for $49.99, which would come with the thingermabobs we need.
I feel more than a bit nuts even considering buying an entire bed for two ten cent parts, so if begging dosen't work we might need to go with Plan C: finding an Ikea bed on Craigslist, jacking these two parts and leaving the rest on the sidewalk. Because that sounds less nuts.
Stay tuned for Act II.
