interior adventures is a series all about my adventures (& misadventures) in re-doing and re-decorating my flat.
Once upon a time (about 3 weeks ago), I decided it was high time to replace my mattress. Maybe it was the combination of being, oh, well a cheap piece of shit from Ikea and it being shared with my then-boyfriend and I resulting in constant uneven weight distribution, but my old mattress had turned into a soft lumpy mess. So uncomfortable was this little shit that I regularly opted for sleeping on the sofa for about a month. After deciding to re-do my flat, I also decided that a new mattress was in order. Now even cheap mattresses aren’t exactly cheap, but I reasoned that it’s something you use every day and that your quality of sleep has a huge impact on your daily performance and overall health in the long run. And thus, on one of my Ikea outings with my best friend Azura, I decided to purchase a memory foam mattress.
Now, I am here to let you in on a slight cultural difference. In the US (And in England as well I am pretty sure) bed measurements are given names: twin, double/full (pretty sure these are the same thing, but to be completely honest, I’m still not sure. Mattresses. Mystifying things.), Queen & King. Here in Germany however, they are named by their length in cm: 140cm, 160cm, 180cm. I know, fascinating right? Well actually, it kind of really fucking is because these 20 cm surprisingly make all the difference. And yet, I still can’t seem to ever remember how big my bed is.
Case in point: I have been known to go to Ikea completely unprepared and having a little internal dialogue with myself about centimeters, venturing an educated guess and crossing my fingers that the sheets I just bought are going to fit my bed. Only this time, the discussion with myself went a little something like this: (Me sitting on a showroom bed) “Oh wow, this is nice! A bit small though. Wait a minute… There’s no way that Nick and I slept on a 140cm bed. Nope. No way in hell. Oh god, I just placed an order for the wrong mattress size.” And so, I kindly asked the woman to change my request to a mattress 20cm bigger than originally requested and strode confidently through the ground floor of Ikea, where I triumphantly picked up my new mattress and organized delivery to my flat that evening all based on a shitty unfounded hunch that went against my initial instinct because MATH.
Now Ikea has this amazing little policy where once you’ve payed for same day delivery, there is no way in hell you are getting your shit off that truck if you happen to be as stupid as I am. So, when I got home and realized…oh wait a minute. Ha. This bed is 140 cm. Funny! (Except not.) It was too late.
The end.
Only that wasn’t really the end. Because now I was stuck with a fucking mattress that was 20 cm too long and a bed that was 20 cm too short. So I did what any mature respectable 20-something year old without a car and little time on her hands would do. As I sat there and thought back to all the times where I felt as if I was a cm away from being pushed off the bed when sharing it with my previous boyfriend and decided that those extra 20cm really did make a difference since I clearly would eventually have a boyfriend again and be faced with the same scenario of clinging to my side of the bed, hoping to not fall off If I were to return this new mattress and keep the old. Plus I just really couldn’t be arsed to rent a truck and drive that bad boy back to Ikea with a license I don’t have. So I posted an ad online for my old bed, mattress, and ordered a same same but different (same frame different size) bed from Ikea. The end.
Except still not.
Because after unpacking my brand spanking new mattress and putting it on the floor for the first few nights, I realized that beds were overrated and a mattress on the floor didn’t look half bad and matched perfectly with the boho vibe I was going for anyway. And so, with that, I decided to cancel my Ikea order (this is also an incredible story, but I will be saving that for another post), save a few hundred euros and do the whole bohemian or starving college student thing. As you can see, I have also purchased the small wooden boxes from my first interior adventures post which make for the perfect side tables.
And so, things are slowly starting to come together. I have made a few changes to the hallway and living room which I will be sharing in the next post of this series. Oh, and p.s. It’s my mother fucking birthday today.
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