My Custom Bed

A little over 4 years ago my wife and I decided to purchase a new bed, as we were waking up very sore on the free mattress we were currently sleeping on.  We had decided to go ahead and buy a very nice mattress, since we both thought at the time that if we spent a lot of money on a nice mattress it would last a long time.  $2400 and 4 years later i wake up more sore than when i was sleeping on the free mattress.

Over the past few months i have been doing a lot of research as to what our next mattress should be.  Our options:

Coil Spring

I knew if i went with another coil spring mattress, it would have to be considerably cheaper, since all spring mattresses appear to last about the same amount of time unless you buy a really cheap one.

Air

My father has one of the air based beds, the sleep by number, and my wife and i had the opportunity to sleep on it for a week.  I was not happy with how it slept, and very annoyed that the firmness changed at random each night, and the pump seemed to always cycle on and off.  The bed was basically falling apart as well.  A lot of research also led me to find out that they tend to have issues with mold growing between the air chamber and the foam topper that is placed on them.  Yuck.

Water

People still use water beds!  Kinda weird i thought.  Ive slept on water beds, but have never liked them.  We didnt give them much consideration at all.

Foam

There are a lot of foam beds out there, and after asking around to a lot of people I have found out that most people really like their foam beds.  They seem to last a lot longer than coil spring, and provide proper support during the lifetime of the bed.  They can be made from simple foam, memory foam, or synthetic/natural latex foam. 

Foam definitely seemed to be the way we wanted to go.  We started shopping for our next bed, but quickly discovered one thing: people like to charge a LOT of money for a foam bed.  As in $1500-$3000 and up for a Cal-King sized bed.  Being the engineer that I am, I about died seeing what they charged for a bed versus the cost of foam.  What could possibly make them so expensive?

NOTHING!

After exhaustive research, every single one of the beds was made of as little has 2 and as many as 7 layers of foam.  Some had 'bolsters' added to the bottom layer of foam, but most were just simple pieces of foam.

I started to research where i could buy each of the layers and was shocked at how cheap the foam can be obtained.  There are many websites that sell foam, and we decided to order ours from http://www.foambymail.com/ and http://www.amazon.com

We decided to model our mattress loosely off of the iComfort line by Serta, as we really liked the feel of their mattresses the best.  I would suggest before you embark on creating your own mattress, that you first try out some at your local mattress stores so that you know which mattress you are going to recreate.

We really liked Sertas gel memory foam, so we actually ordered their name brand foam.  How you ask?  A mattress topper!  We purchased the mattress topper from Amazon.com.  The rest of our mattress was standard foam that can be ordered from foambymail.com (FBM from now on).

This is the layout we went with:

2.5" Gel Memory Foam (Serta)

2.5" HD36-High Quality Eggcrate

2.5" LUX-High Quality Eggcrate

4" LUX-High Quality Foam

Shipping is free from FBM on orders over 100 bucks, and most amazon orders ship free and luckily the mattress topper was one of those items.  We placed our order and a week later we had all the pieces to make our mattress.

The foam comes highly compressed for shipping reasons, and per the manufacturer needs to be opened up ASAP in order to prevent it from permanently being deformed.

 Here is what came in the mail:

Foam in packaging.  Left package is both eggcrate, and the right one is the 4" lux.

Serta memory foam and cover.

The memory foam took the longest to regain its shape (4 hours) and had quite a smell to it.

Unrolling the memory foam.

Corners stayed smashed for a while.  Patience is key here.

Another shot of the corner after more time elapsed.

Almost there....

All the way expanded.  Amazing how small they can squish this stuff for shipping.

Here is the foam.  You can see how much larger it is after unpacking.

Before removing the plastic... 

And after....

Video of the foam expanding.

This is the final product.

And with a cover...

 

The smell is not as bad as when we first assembled the bed about 2 weeks ago, but it is still there.  The first few nights were rough, and I really think we probabaly should have let it air out longer before we started to sleep on it.  I'm expecting it to completely dissapate in another week.

Sleep
The most important part of this whole thing.  How are we sleeping on it?  GREAT!  We both love it and are getting absolutely great sleep. 

Test of time
We shall see how this bad boy holds up over time.  I'll keep this blog post up to date as time goes on with developments on if we still like the mattress and how it is holding up.