Waterbed Follow Up

So, you ask, “Whatever happened about that leaky waterbed?” It took us a while to figure out what we were going to do. But in the end we decided to go with a regular bed. We just couldn’t face having to drain and fill the waterbed time after time. After we emptied the waterbed, we disassembled the frame, pedestal, and base. The carpeting was soaked and it had been a few days since the leak and we just didn’t think we could get the water cleaned out of the carpet. I took our frame down to the basement, the only place where we had enough room to lay it out, and started to tear up the carpeting. While the carpeting was soggy and nasty, the floor underneath had not sustained any damage. In fact, there was more deterioration under the windows where condensation had dripped down and soaked into the sub flooring over the years. We decided we would like to have a hardwood floor instead of more carpeting and we thought we would try to do it as a home improvement project on our own.

We looked at Menard’s, Home Depot, and Lowe’s and decided we’d like a dark wood the best. The thought of having a floating floor appealed to us because it was the easiest to lay down. There are three sorts; solid hardwood, engineered, and laminate. The engineered flooring is like plywood there are several layers of cross grained woods with a hardwood layer on top. The only problem with that was we couldn’t get interlocking tongue and groove which is necessary for the floating floor. It only had a regular tongue and groove and that meant we would have to nail it down and a flooring gun for my compressor would cost a couple of hundred dollars. The same was true with a solid hardwood floor. We opted to go with the interlocking tongue and groove but we could only get that in laminate. The cost of all three options was about the same so it didn’t really bother us.

We had a little problem putting it in at first because the interlocking part wasn’t working the way it should have and their suggested procedure for laying the floor down just wasn’t working. After a while we did figure out how to make it work right and once that happened, progress was fairly rapid. Here’s how the room looked when we were done.

Now we had the irksome task of researching new beds. If we stuck with the waterbed we were going to have to buy a new liner, heater, and mattress. This would be a fairly expensive proposition. Heaters are usually over $100, a liner is 20 or $30, and the mattress itself would be about 65 or $70. But as I said earlier we weren’t all that excited about dealing with the leaks of a waterbed any longer. We went to a couple of stores to look at regular mattresses and got a severe case of sticker shock. We saw some mattresses that cost over $2000. They have three levels these days; firm, plush, and pillow top. Pillow top is the softest, but seemed fairly hard to someone who had been sleeping on a waterbed for the last 35 years. We decided to go with the pillow top anyway. In the old days you would buy a mattress and box springs. Nowadays, there really are no box springs. That part is merely a reinforced box to raise the mattress. The springs are now in the mattress and whatever padding the mattress has is on top of those springs. Since “box springs” are nothing more than a platform, we decided to use the pedestal and base from the waterbed for the platform, at least for the time being. Its shape does not exactly match the mattress but is fairly close and would do for the moment. We will eventually buy a couple of new pieces of plywood and some additional boards for the pedestal and trim the outside with a beautiful strip of hardwood. We will probably get figured White Oak or Red Oak since that’s what the other wooden things in our bedroom are.

So after a month of sleeping in temporary quarters, we were finally back in our own bedroom and slowly, little by little, we are adapting to our new bed.