Our Bed Shopping Experience While Sleep Deprived

This is a special day for Kathy and me: we got our bed working again! I know most of you have those beds that work just because you’re lying in it, but we don’t.

That’s not how we roll in our golden years.

We have a $6,000 bed that we call the Queen Elizabeth. Maybe I’ll tell the entire story of why we spent that much money on a bed when I’m as old as Gloria Stuart was when she told her story in the Titantic. I have a lot of those stories that can’t be told until I’m decrepit and ready to bite the dust. I just hope I have some warning before my time is up. I don’t want my best stories to die with me.

The short version I can tell is still good, I think; it’s just not going to have you on the edge of your seats, biting your nails like the story I could tell you, but Kathy would kill me if I did.

We were in Florida attending to family business last August and September. We were sleeping on a bed there that felt just a little better than rocks, and our task didn’t allow us much sleep anyway.

After our time was finished there, on our way home we began talking about how important a good bed is to well-being, so we decided to buy a new bed.

It was a tough time in Florida, among the toughest of times in our marriage of forty-three years. The night we got back to our bed, we both woke up at 3 AM. Sleep issues aren’t uncommon for me, but Kathy never had them before. Next night same thing: both of us wide awake at 3 AM. After days of this and more of what I can’t talk about until I’m ready to bite the dust, we take off to Rooms-To-Go to buy a bed.

We went in the store all glassy-eyed and sleep deprived to buy a regular bed with a good mattress — we really did — but the big ones, with the high, thick mattresses looked so good through our sleepy eyes. After lying on several, we finally landed on the mother of all mattresses. It sat on recliners, both head and foot, and the recliners sat on boxes of drawers and a massager.

While lying on the bed, holding hands, massager at full speed, we told the salesman, “How fast can you deliver it?” He quickly replied, “Two weeks, less if you can do without the massager.”

“No, gotta have the massager,” I told him without hesitation.

Before we left the store, we bought a $2,500 couch that we could both lie on to watch TV before climbing into our $6,000 Queen Elizabeth.

Don’t ever go bed shopping sleep deprived, suffering from PTSD, if you don’t have money to burn and maybe not even then.

That bed in our bedroom looked a lot bigger than it did in the furniture store. Sitting on the drawers, it was humongous and extremely hard to make. Without success, Kathy tried several bedspreads, and they were not cheap.

I don’t want to know how much it cost to have the drawers replaced with something sitting less than four feet off the floor, but I’m guessing what we have in the bed at this point is a lot more than $6,000.

We enjoyed the bed until six weeks ago, when one side ceased operating and was stuck in the “up” position. No big deal, right? Anything that breaks can be fixed. Not now, it can’t. We couldn’t get anyone to answer the phone. Seems a lot of people bought awfully expensive beds during this year of COVID and many of them must have had issues like we did. Couple that with the world shutting down for weeks, and we were experiencing a major service back up.

Five weeks of no one answering the phone or calling back, I think “Facebook.” Don’t ever slight the power of Facebook. Within two hours, of messaging the manufacturer on Facebook, I got a return message. What we couldn’t get in five weeks through the traditional route, we got in two hours on Facebook!

The manufacturer sent us replacement parts.

This bed is so heavy, it’s hard to push it a few inches across our hardwood floor, much less remove the heavy mattress, lift the two recliners from the tight frame and turn them upside down, and replace parts, but we did it!

The world is far from fully functioning now, so we weren’t really surprised that they were not the right parts.

But another box was waiting on us when we got back from or trip to the coast!

I replaced them today!

It’s all working again, but in the process we knocked a hole in our sheetrock.

One third of human lives are spent in bed. (That’s on average. It’s half for us because we usually drink coffee until 9:30 or 10:00.) So, the money we spent on a super-deluxe Queen Elizabeth that we wouldn’t have if we weren’t temporarily insane ended up being money well spent!