Saga of the bed, etc.

[celticdragonfly]

Thursday morning our bed broke again.

This has been a recurring problem for us. selenite's old Ikea queen size was a slat bed that used to dump my side of the mattress down repeatedly. We went to a mattress on the floor for some time, and then got a new bed.

http://celticdragonfly.livejournal.com/8082.html details the first time that bed broke. And http://celticdragonfly.livejournal.com/8515.html is when selenite rebuilt it for us.

So Thursday it broke again. Once again, no wild, earthshattering sex was being had. We'd been asleep, early in the morning Maggie came in wanting cuddles, then after she was in with me wanted a drink. We went and got it, climbed back in, and WHAM, the corner up near my head broke.

I do NOT like that feeling. It's entirely too reminiscent of earthquakes.

After much discussion, selenite and I decided to just take it apart, put the mattress and boxsprings back on the floor - as they had been between shortly after Jamie's birth and just after my surgery in October, when I really needed a high bed again and he'd put it back up for me - and then let him fix the frame at his leisure.

Fortunately for us, fordprfct was kind enough to come over to help with the heavy lifting. The guys got the bed apart, and selenite planned to put the pieces in the green bedroom - which I wanted cleaned out so we could use it as a guest bedroom this weekend, since kd5mdk and jazz007 are staying over for the Housefilk Saturday. fordprfct was willing to help me clean that out, and we got it done much better and more quickly than I had anticipated. I was determined to be ruthless, which ended up with me telling fordprfct some of the O'Henry stories he had not encountered. (What was his English teacher thinking?) Vacuumed it out, the guys moved the bed pieces in there, and we moved the old guest couch in there. (Sorry, Andy and Jazz, we haven't a real bed in there yet. There are Plans.) Thanks much for the help, fordprfct.

So then all was well, and we could go play a couple of games of Munchkin. We've now played 3 games, and each of us has won once.

Comments

[telophase.livejournal.com]

When I was growign up and my bed had that problem, my dad ended up drilling a hole in either side of the metal part of the frame that held the slats, and stringing wire rope through it, with some sort of dealybopper that allowed him to twist and tighten the wire rope and pull the sides of the frame together, and then keep it under tension. It worked.

[shadefell.livejournal.com]

Oh man, aren't you glad that the bed didn't fail while you were still recuperating from your surgery?

When I was growing up, my bed was antique and we didn't have the crazy rope system to support the mattress (you know, "good night, sleep tight" is more than just an expression!), so we put wooden slats along the bottom where someone a generation or so back had put rails in. That worked pretty well, except when the slats moved a bit and would fall out with alarming noise at 2am.

[msminlr.livejournal.com]

I have also been known to wire bed slats into the frame when there was too much slack width.

Have you ever considered buying enough concrete blocks to support the mattress on, then just bolting the headboard to the wall?

I'm also tempted to look into some of these single-drawer storage units that Rubbermaid and Sterilite offer, lining up enough of them along the sides and across the bottom to support the springs (we'd need a couple of dummy units up the middle, since ours is a king size bed with two-part box springs) and then figuring out how to lash the units together such that they would not move around but I could still get the drawers to slide out. There is NEVER enough storage in an apartment!