A New Mattress

As everyone who owns an RV already knows, the mattress that comes with the unit is not all that good. For two years, we put up with (I won't say suffered with, it wasn't that bad) the original mattress in our Montana 5th-wheel. For the past few months we have been planning to buy a new one as soon as we arrived in Mesa. Here we have lots of dealers to choose from and the mattress could be delivered with no problem. During our time in Denver, we were in state parks and they would have charged the delivery truck an entrance fee.

The original mattress was characterized as king size. But that didn't mean regular king size sheets fit it. Also, it was really wider than was convenient in the bedroom. To make the bed I had to push the mattress from side to side. And to get into bed on the closet side, I had to turn sideways, the aisle was so narrow. What really fits the room is a short queen. A regular queen mattress would be about three inches too long for the slide to close. But not everyone stocks a short queen mattress and they can be much more expensive than other sizes.

I had Googled "custom mattresses, Phoenix" and found several dealers. We found a small, family-owned shop, AZ Mattress Outlet, that has all their mattresses custom-manufactured here in town. For only $379 we were able to purchase what we wanted.

It was delivered Saturday evening--the company is so small that one of the owners operated the store all day, then started making deliveries. I had measured the board under the mattress and thought it would be just the right size. Oh Oh, look at this!



And it was the same on the other side, as well. Needless to say, we were veeerrry careful getting in and out of bed that night.

Sunday, we took the mattress off.



Then we saw what we had to deal with.



I imagine I had measured the board near the headboard after I pushed the mattress toward the foot. Since we don't have a power saw and the Tool Shed here in the park, where we can borrow tools, isn't open for the season, we had to figure something else out.

John removed the screws that attached the hydraulic lifts to this board, as well as those attaching hinges between the two boards.



We loaded the board into the back of our pickup truck.



And drove it across the street to Lowe's.



It took a little while to convince the staff to cut the board--after all, we didn't buy it there. Once they were convinced, it took maybe five to seven minutes to cut off three sides of the board. They charged us the whopping sum of 79 cents--that is 25 cents per cut plus tax. Then we were headed back to the RV.

John re-installed all the screws.



Now, this is what it is supposed to look like.




And here is how our bedroom looks now. We didn't think the old mattress was all that bad. But we sure are sleeping better now. And the bed is much easier to make. However, the new mattress is much thicker and when I sit on the bed, my feet don't touch the floor.