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A new place to lay our heads

When we first toured our house it was vacant except for some plants, bingo balls, a nightstand, and a queen mattress.  

We didn't have a bed that could fit two people so working the mattress into our contract for dirt cheep seemed like a great idea.

Lesson learned:  If someone is trying to get rid of their mattress, you don't want it.

What started as a thrifty idea turned into a few months of bad sleep on a saggy mattress.  Also, we didn't find it gross at the time but now that I know more about what lives in mattresses I can't believe we would take a bed from perfect strangers!  We didn't, however, like the idea of dropping a large amount of money on a brand new queen mattress especially when we were slightly concerned that it was also the size of the bed rather than just the quality that was causing our back pain and sleepless nights.  You see, we slept in really nice king beds on our honeymoon and vacations and we'll admit it, we got totally spoiled on all that space.  So to weed out why we weren't resting well we borrowed another queen mattress from Mike's parents.  This queen was very new and had only been slept on for a few months before they decided they didn't like it and had put it in their guest bedroom.  Even with this newer, more supportive pillowtop mattress we weren't resting as deeply as when we would sleep alone.  And to be honest, we had been sleeping separately more and more due to exhaustion, illness and back pain over the holidays!

The pea in our bed was unfortunately the proximity of each other!  So we decided if we were getting a new mattress, we should go for a king.  The only problem, a mattress had to fit through this doorway:

You can barely fit a queen through there!  In fact, the current bed has a split box spring because a queen box spring wouldn't fit and the queen from Mike's parents barely fit up the stairs.  Shy of taking the roof off and bringing the mattress in with a crane, we thought we were out of luck.

... Until we remembered a certain infomercial commercial. 

What's so fabulous about sleep number beds?  They come in small boxes and you build the bed in the bedroom.  Well, that and a whole bunch of pseudo-science mumbo jumbo proving they're the best mattresses in the world and can cure snoring/cancer.  We just liked that it fit up our stairs   And because everyone we know who has one says they're great, we thought it would be worth a try!

It turns out there was a sale for $600 off the mattress we wanted, so we jumped on it (the sale, not the bed. Are you supposed to jump on sleep numbers?).  We ordered it and waited patiently while the bed was shipped.  It arrived and to our delight, it fit up our stairs!  Now, there was the option to pay an extra $100 for a sleep number person to come set the bed up.  That's not for us; we're professional DIYers!  The salesperson said it would take about 2 hours to assemble but Mike figured he could get er' done in an hour flat.  Including taking apart our current bed.  Not the case.  We worked on it from 5:00 till 10:30.  Granted we took a 3 hour break in the middle to go to Bible study, but still, our hour estimation was way off!  Either way, we ended up finishing that night and sleeping in the new bed together!

We're getting used to photo-documenting our lives so naturally I set up a tripod before we started and took a picture every once in a while.  Here's the progression.  

And in the morning after we made the bed.

We've only spent a few nights in it, but so far so good!  We're digging the extra space and the ability to have the firmness to our specific tastes.  We are, however missing the beauty of the old bed.  This king is not the prettiest thing!  We don't have a headboard, footboard, or bedskirt that will fit yet so it looks like a big blob hovering in our room.  We loved the old iron bed frame and are hoping to not only switch it into the guest bedroom, but find something similar again for this king.  We did get a set of king sheets (basic cream) but will be eventually getting a second set that will hopefully be near the aqua blue we had on the queen.  A bed skirt is also on the future to-buy list.  But for now we're content with our great nights of sleep and with waiting for the right deal/headboard to fall into our laps!