269. Mattresses

Mattresses are weird things. You will use it every day. It touches your body just about as much as your clothes. You basically keep it in one place the entire time you use it. You hate bringing it up to your bedroom, and then you love it when you get a good night’s sleep, but as soon as you replace it, you hate it. You don’t know what to do with it.

It’s hard to give a mattress away, at least to someone you don’t know. I mean, it’s understandable. You don’t know if the person had some sort of disease, or what they all did in their bed. You don’t know if there are bed bugs or some other weird fungi.

In Boston, I saw a lot of mattresses on the sidewalk. I didn’t want to be that guy when I had to get rid of my mattress, so I called up a junk hauler. It wasn’t cheap at around 75 bucks to have them take it away. I felt bad having it destroyed because I had paid like $500 for my mattress and I got rid of it about 16 months later.

I had a similar problem at my new place. I had been sleeping on my old twin mattress along with the box spring. It was fine, but I wanted a change. It was nice to finally get a queen size mattress. Except I had to get rid of the old one. I was in a quandary..

I didn’t want to pay to haul it away. I tried to give it away, but both box spring and mattress were a little old. No bites there. I didn’t have the vehicle to haul it away to the dump. I also didn’t want to be an jerk and leave it by the dumpsters at my apartment complex. So I decided to take matters into my own hands. I wanted to take it apart myself.

I looked up a few videos and it didn’t look like it would be difficult. All i needed was a utility knife and some sort of way to cut the wires. I took the mattress out to my garage on Sunday afternoon. I grabbed a wire cutter and a utility knife and got to work.

You start by cutting around the edge of the mattress. The fabric cut pretty easily. THere was a layer of foam and some weird compressed cloth material underneath it. The hardest part was taking out the spring roll. I was using a hand held wire cutter to take apart the wires. Boy was that taking a lot of time.

I went to Home Depot and bought a bolt cutters for about 18 bucks. It was slightly more expensive than the price to dump the mattress ($15), but I thought it was worth it. I got everything apart and the material took up two garbage bags. I didn’t throw the wires away because I think I should take them to the dump.

I realize this was probably a boring post, but I needed something to write about. Destroying a mattress got me some exercise and it was great to get it out of my bedroom.