Musical Mattresses

Oh, my aching back. We've been on quite the saga recently trying to find a mattress that works for us. Only two years ago, we bought a high-end Simmons mattress to replace one I'd had for years. On the old one, my back would ache after about seven hours, and if I dared to sleep in on a weekend for more than eight, I'd wake up with back spasms. Sue also thought it was really lumpy, so we plunked down something like $1100 for a Simmons spring mattress with some latex foam or something like that. Oooo, it felt good. For about a month.

After a month, the backaches returned. It's now two years later and my back hurts and Sue's hips kill her on the mattress. Her side is all lumpy and my side has a huge hole where my hips go. I'm not a heavy guy by any means, but I apparently have a knack for breaking down a mattress.

A few months ago, we got a poly-fill pillowtop for the Simmons mattress. It was nice and puffy for about a week. After that, the areas where we lie became all matted down and flat, and with the rest of it still puffy, each night we were sleeping in a deep valley. The middle of the bed between us became known as "the ridge".

A couple weeks ago, we'd had enough and decided to look seriously at a Tempurpedic visco-elastic "memory foam" bed. I'd heard great things about these beds. A cyclist I know swears by his. Money be damned, we headed to our local contemporary furniture store and flopped down for half an hour on a "Deluxe" Tempurpedic. It was very nice, comfortable, and supportive. We put $2200 plus on plastic and put the huge queen-sized box containing the huge queen-size mattress in the back of the pickup. These things are not light. A queen-size, dense memory foam mattress runs about 200 pounds. We called a neighbor friend over that evening to help get it upstairs. In the process, I fell backwards out through the latched screen door, snapping off the latch bracket. What fun it all was.

We made up the bed and flopped down. Clunk. Clunk? It was probably an imagined sound, but the mattress was so firm, clunk describes the feeling of my shoulders hitting the bed. Everyone talks about how you're supposed to sink into these mattresses and be so comfortable that you don't move at all during the night. Instead, I was aware of Sue flopping around like a fish yanked up onto a dock, and I also woke a few times and flipped sides. We're both side sleepers, and we clearly didn't weigh enough to sink into the mattress at all. It was far firmer than the one in the showroom.

I awoke in the morning with sore ribs, and although the change in support was favorable to Sue's hips, she could barely open her jaw and had a stiff neck from her shoulder being jammed up into her neck area.

We put our old pillowtop on the new mattress and spent a night that way. Not enough. It was so compressed from a few months on it, there was no longer enough cushioning.

After work the next day, I ran over to Bed, Bath, and Beyond (nice folks and very pleasant with returns as you will read) and picked up their best poly-fill pillow top. A couple nights passed with the same results. My shoulders were sore and Sue had trouble chewing breakfast.

I went back to BB&B and exchanged the $120 poly pillowtop for a $300 four-inch thick memory foam topper. This foam was much softer than the Tempurpedic, so the theory here was that the soft foam on the hard foam would be, in the words of Goldielocks, just right.

The "queen size" topper comes rolled up in a fairly small box. They must pack the thing in with a steamroller and vacuum packer to get it in the box. It was a bit like a novelty can of snakes the way the topper expanded after unwrapping it. I flopped it down on top of our mattress. Odd, it didn't reach the edges. The measurements of the topper were 54x76. Standard U.S. queen-size is 60x80. What's up with that? Strike one.

We slept on that for a couple nights. It smelled really bad. It was the kind of unnatural smell that made you wonder if you were destined to get some sort of cancer from inhaling chemical and plastic fumes every night for a few years. Strike two.

We were back where we started. It was soft enough for our shoulders, but now the back and hip aches had returned from lack of support. Strike three.

I tried to get the topper squashed back into the box. My best try involved an upside-down coffee table stacked with 45-pound weight plates (and me) on top of the thing, but it was no use. I wrapped it in packing plastic, and we headed back to Bed, Bath, and Beyond with it and the empty box. They were great and gave us a full refund, no questions asked except for the rhetorical the cashier asked as she carried the incompressible topper away, "Now, what am I going to do with this thing?" I hope she had more coffee tables and weights to stack on that thing than I did.

I spent an evening boxing the Tempurpedic mattress back up. We were done with it and it was going back, regardless of the $200 "restocking" fee it would incur. We'd kept the original packing materials to return it as they'd suggested. It took me about an hour to get the 200-pound mattress spun around, slid into the box, and taped shut with enough packing tape to keep it from breaking through. That was when I realized I hadn't put the plastic bag around the mattress. I spent another hour unpacking it, wrapping it in plastic, and then putting it back in the box. I might have skipped it, but I didn't want any excuses from the store during the return.

We borrowed my brother-in-law yesterday to help get the 200-pound box back downstairs and back into the truck. Then it was off to the furniture store.

The two women there were very nice, but started off by telling us we'd need to come back the next day when the manager was on duty to arrange the return. We started arguing that point when they brought up having to arrange for pick-up. "Oh, we brought it in our truck. It's in the parking lot." Their faces quickly turned to an expression of, "Oh, shit. What do we do now?" and they hustled off to get the manager on the phone. They still wanted us to come back the next day, but there was no way we were going to cart that thing back home and then back to the store again. They finally relented and opened their back door so I could slide the thing off the truck and back into their warehouse, in the exact spot it had come from.

I returned the next day, credit card and receipt in hand, to finish the paperwork with the store manager. I was ready for them to try and get a higher fee than the $200 return they'd quoted us. The manager said, "I spoke with the owner and he remembered when you picked it up. He said he'd quoted you $200. The return fee is actually $300, but we're sticking with his word and we'll only charge $200." Good thing. He ran the credit card through and gave us a refund of $2050.92. We'd paid a total of $2267.00, so I was surprised to find that $2267 minus $200 is $2050.92, but it was close enough not to dicker with the guy. I just wanted out.

So, we're now sleeping on our full-size Aerobed inflatable bed with the old, flat pillowtop on it. It's a little funny having a full mattress on a queen platform, but what the heck. It's not super-comfortable, but it's better for now than the old bumpy and hole-ful Simmons. We're looking into pursuing a warranty claim with Simmons, since the thing had a 10 or 15-year guarantee. I'm guessing that'll either go nowhere or else we'll decide it costs too much to ship a mattress back to the manufacturer.

So the search for the perfect mattress continues. We paid $216.08 to find out that we don't like Tempurpedic. We don't know what to try next. Air? Spring? Different foam? We want something that's not too firm, not too soft, and stays that way more than a month. Is that too much to ask? When buying a mattress, it might just be.