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.