We spent the whole of last week running around like headless chickens trying to get the house sorted before Joe’s mum and aunt came to stay. Since we started our own business, our house cleaning and tidying routine has been close to non-existent (no more cleaning lady – we’re on a shoestring budget, boo). The only time we ever do anything is just before people come over, which means we’re always playing catch up.

A couple of weeks ago I reached my limit of eating cereal out of mugs and not being able to see out of the windows, and that combined with spring + Joe’s family coming to visit meant a huge house overhaul was in order.

I do like being organised and having systems, so although the house was a bit out of control and we had to dump a lot of junk in the garage and tidy a lot of stuff away into cupboards, the only truly disastrous room was Joe’s. As we have three double bedrooms, the idea was that Joe’s aunt would have the spare room, his mum would have ‘my’ room, and Joe and I would have his room (the least guest-friendly option, given the state of it).

It’s literally looked like an episode of Extreme Hoarders for several years. He doesn’t sleep in there. Every few months he spends a couple of hours on it, and to be honest you can’t tell the difference at all. When he started on it this time, and actually did it properly, it took him a week of working about eight hours a day on it…and it’s still not quite done. But at least you can see the floor now. Confession: normally, I have a bit of floordrobe going on. Joe’s floor was so bad he had to cut vertically through the piles of stuff as well as horizontally.

But when it was done, it looked really good. (And the advantage of having so much stuff on the floor 24/7 is that his floorboards look brand new, instead of all scuffed like mine. But don’t tell him I said that).

Anyway, I was so happy I wasn’t going to die of claustrophobia, and so confident I wouldn’t find bits of mouse corpse (thanks cats), that I didn’t even think about the bed and actually sleeping in there.

The Princess and the Pea

I can’t even describe to you how awful it was to get into that bed after a long day (10+ miles of walking, 18 hours of awake time and work), and literally hear a comedy “sproiiing” from a totally gone spring. I felt like I was lying on solid cottage cheese the mattress was so lumpy.

I’m so tired these days that I could probably sleep on a rock in a thunderstorm, so it shows you how bad it was that I had to get up and investigate just why it was so bad.

This is what I found:

The world’s cheapest mattress
A thin hand towel placed over an exposed spring (?!)
A raggedy thin cottage cheese duvet on top of that
And then the fitted bed sheet.

ARE YOU KIDDING ME. (I won’t go into detail about the ‘Why didn’t you TELL me?’ ‘Why do you think I never sleep there?’ conversation that ensued).

In fact, I think adding a pea to the situation probably would have improved it, it was that bad.

I thought about it a bit, debated sleeping scrunched up on the sofa, and then I did some slight rearranging, found a thick comforter and a double throw, put them on top, put the duvet on top of THAT, and then lay down. It was passable. Then I had another throw on top of me as a blanket, and that was just about okay. (Chiefy was looking at me mournfully from the other side of the bed, and it wasn’t just because she’d hurt her paw).

After two nights of the worst sleep ever, I have NEVER been so excited to see my own bed again. (Not even as much as the time we got back from Chernobyl). Lovely mattress. Lovely memory foam mattress topper. Nice thick duvet. Absolute bliss. Joe was laughing at me because I was so happy.

The New Mattress Hunt

So of course the next task was to sort out the old mattress. Joe is the kind of person who would leave it, forget about it, and then regret it the next time we were forced to sleep there. Our local council has a free bulky waste collection, so getting rid of that old thing (the mattress, not Joe) was no problem.

The real issue was finding something comfortable, practical, and long-lasting on next to no budget. All our money goes into our business at the moment, and good mattresses are crazy expensive. I did a bit of research online, dismissed everything as too rubbish or too expensive (or both), and kind of put it all on hold for a couple of days until my friend Hannah messaged me asking for my opinion on a photography course she’d seen on Groupon. Light bulb moment.

Next thing I was looking at the best mattress deals on Groupon (sorry Hannah). Hannah is an obsessive Groupon user, but I don’t spend much time there myself so I was honestly amazed at how much choice there is for mattresses, because I thought it was mostly holidays and restaurant deals they did (or maybe those are the only links she usually sends me ;)).

And best of all, they do all-in-one memory foam mattresses, so I didn’t even need to buy a mattress and a separate topper (the one disadvantage of my own comfy setup is that the heavy topper slips and slides out of position over time). In the end I picked out the Bubbles Memory Foam Mattress, because it looks amazing and the price is even better. I’m thinking that I might take it for my own room and dump my current mattress and topper in Joe’s, but we’ll see how it works out and what I can get away with.

Meanwhile, I’m just excited to be able to get some proper sleep again.