Excavation

Project Bedroom continues. I spent a year fretting about how to get rid of my bed frame and mattress, and managed to do both (with the help of friends!!) in November and February. I spent a lot of time between July and February getting rid of the other non-bed bedroom stuff, so after the mattress was gone I was pretty close to a clean slate.

Next was buying a new mattress - I opted to buy a latex foam mattress from a local shop that has some rather old-school notions of doing business: no deliveries, no returns. Again, with the help of friends I got the mattress up the three flights of stairs to my apartment.

Finally, I bought and assembled a bed frame - I got it from the same place I got my mattress, and got just the four-sided no-headboard model, figuring I can upgrade and get a headboard some other day.  No matter my pangs re: headboards and lack thereof, it IS a delight to be in a bed again, after a couple of months of sleeping on a mattress on the floor!

I've had some cause to regret my lack of method in mattress shopping. I am a very decisive but also somewhat lazy person, and part of that means I make a choice and move on, rather than comparing a number of options for a period of time. In other words, I didn't bother shopping around. Instead, I bought a mattress that was very comfy in the store but hasn't been perfect at home. I think it is slightly too firm and will relax over time; for the meantime I've purchased a mattress topper to soften it up for now. My back is still not 100% happy but at least I've stopped thinking about it obsessively! (I'm sure my friends are happy not to hear about it daily.)

I ordered an area rug from Crate and Barrel in early February, but it's back-ordered until May, which is a huge bummer. I haven't really gotten to thinking about curtains and artwork. Actually I HAVE thought about artwork - I'd love to hang my GGB picture above my bed, but am too paranoid in this land of earthquakes to have a heavy glass-covered object over my head at night.

Anyway, the next thing to conquer is bedside tables - right now I'm just piling stuff up on the floor by my bed! I felt a bit like a sociologist this morning, when I examined the pile and thought about what it might say about me. Currently my bedside heap consists of:

• book of crossword puzzles & mechanical pencil; 
• two books from the P.G. Wodehouse series Jeeves & Wooster; 
• two library books; 
• a container for earplugs (even containing a pair of said plugs); 
• box of kleenex left over from when I had a cold in February; 
• two or three magazines that I've finished reading but want to write down some information from before passing them along to my friend. 
• and a lamp, of course!

I spent over an hour in IKEA today and didn't find what I was looking for, bedside-table-wise, so I might just borrow from my living room for a while and figure it out later. But my parents are visiting in April and I'd like to have something on each side of the bed by then!