People have been building and destroying empires for thousands of years all while sleeping on various sorts of mats and piles of animal hair and plant fibers. For a while there, they strung ropes across wooden frames with a bag of animal hair on top. Every so often they would untie the ropes, tighten them and re-tie the knot so that the bed wouldn't sag down to the floor where the bugs were. "Sleep tight, don't let the bed bugs bite."
In some parts of the world there are still craftsmen that make mattresses for a living. The man makes you a mattress once and you keep that mattress your whole life, occasionally taking it back to him to be re-carded and re-stuffed.
When we got married, we did the sensible thing. We went out and bought an innerspring mattress from a department store. It wore out. Rebuilding it is not even an option. Which is a shame considering what we paid for it.
So I did some thinking and some research (how I found out all those tidbits above) and decided that the only group of people who seem to be even remotely happy with their beds are the foam mattress people. And I discovered that there is an outrageous markup on foam mattresses and that you can buy the foam direct from the foam manufacturers as opposed to the mattress companies.
Long story short: I made my own mattress out of 6 inches of high density polyurethane foam for the base and 4 inches of 5 lb memory foam. I encased it in a soft, stretchy jacquard velour case (similar to Tempurpedic's) I found on ebay. If I really wanted to be tricky, I could have ordered a replacement Tempurpedic case, but they want too much money even for the cases. If you were to buy a basic name brand memory foam mattress you would get pretty much the exact same thing, only the two slabs of foam are glued together, and they put a slightly nicer case around it and of course you would pay 3 or 4 times as much as I paid. I chose not to have the slabs glued together so that I can change out one layer or the other if needed. Once it is all zipped up, you can't tell the difference anyway and since altogether it weighs over 130 pounds, being able to move the awkward floppy slabs separately helps.
The finished product:
The memory foam test:
I considered a cheaper knock-off memory foam mattress, but I learned that they use inferior grades of foam. My mattress was only about $100 more than the knock offs I found online, but I knew that I was getting the top grade foam for both the base/support layer and the memory layer.
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