No, she's not a child.
She is, in fact,
a bed.
So, Joel and I have been wanting a new mattress for a long time. Ours had a HUGE dip in the middle, and we've both been waking up sore for at least a year. We went mattress shopping a few times, but it's so hard! They all were good, better than what we had, but not "perfect enough." We weren't willing to commit to any of them. I don't remember why, but one day, I started looking online and discovered that buying mattresses online is a thing. What?! I read about it for hours - how to buy a bed without trying it first, return policies, reviews of certain mattresses... and what started as, "Haha, wouldn't that be hilarious and weird if we bought a bed online?" became, "Alright, shall we do it?"
Here's what we learned:
Buying a mattress online can be less expensive because there's no middle man.
Most online mattress companies have 1-3 firmness levels, making it easier because you don't have to test a million beds, but a little scarier, too, if you like to try out the mattress first.
All online mattress companies I read about produce a pretty firm mattress - what's "average," or about 6-7 on a scale of 1-10, with 1 being the cushiest.
Every company I researched had a 90-101 night return policy - if you don't like it, you can return it for a full refund. They all have a free pick-up policy. One company's policy was to pick it up and then donate it to a shelter. (No restocking fee because they never restock a mattress.)
Ours is pretty foamy, as opposed to having coils. It came in this box:
It weighed 96 pounds. Never have I been so excited to see a package on our front porch! And never have I been so disappointed to hear the "you have a package" knock on the door that came two days earlier...
The mattress was vacuum-sealed in the box, so the instructions were that we position the box where we wanted the bed to end up, open it on its side, pull out the mattress, and cut the plastic enveloping it. Then we just watched! Five minutes later, we had this:
a beautiful, super soft (to the touch), firm mattress...
THAT WE LOVE!
I never would've thought I'd enjoy a firm mattress, but man. It's so nice. We love it. We budgeted for the possibility of buying a $100 mattress topper if we hated the firmness, but we didn't have to. This particular mattress has a thin layer of soft foam on top of firm foam, so it feels cushy but firm... if that makes any sense. We're still far away from our 100th night, but I can't imagine our opinion changing. Would we buy a mattress online again? Definitely. Would we buy a
Leesa again? Also yes. If you need a new mattress and want to lay on ours to see what Internet beds are like (and if I'm friends with you in real life...), let me know!
___________________________________________
In life, the hardest decisions often have to be made more than once. But each time, it gets easier.
Icefall