I feel like Week Four has been the least productive week so far and my stress level went up quite a few notches. What am I stressing about? Are you new here? Well, Hey, I'm Kristian, Mom to Q, I am completely transforming his bedroom from "Three Shades of No" to "Little Scottish Laddie" in 6 weeks, and documenting it all for The One Room Challenge. I'm not the only one either, there are 20 Featured Designers and 100s of Guest Participants taking on the challenge too! If you need to catch up with the befores, design plan, and earlier progress...click these:
WEEK ONE I WEEK TWO I WEEK THREE
Quick update...
No, the painting is not completely done. I still haven't found the perfect reading chair. I have a few small things left that I need to hurry up and source. And diys are pending. Ugh. Baseball, family get togethers, Q going out of the country, and mauled chickens have reaped havoc upon my ORC progress. I. am. a. mess.
If you are following along on Instagram...
You might have seen that I did get around to working on the bed frame issue: The Mattress.
You can catch sneak peaks like this along with other ORC "behind the posts" moments in the ORC Highlights. So, The Mattress came in, and I say "The Mattress" for a few reasons:
I) It has been an ordeal for way too long, I was doing all kinds of rigging to try and make a modern sized mattress fit an antique bed, eh.
II) It took me equally as long to figure out a plan and source what I needed.
III) It was like Christmas when it arrived. I was thrilled that this was finally happening, and Q was thrilled for the coolest box to play in.
IV) Q and I snuggled and had the best sleep on this thing, so now I have to have one for my bed too, which will also need a new frame. Domino effect.
V) Here is the link if you are interested in this one. I would love to hear feedback from you if you own a memory foam mattress (brand, thickness, how it sleeps, etc) before I buy one for myself. While searching for Q's, I learned that the thicker it is the harder it will be. Q's is a 6" and sleeps so nice, but I could definitely go softer!
So my plan was to use a foam mattress and cut it to fit within the side rails. I had hoped that the mattress would form to the bed (you see how it is compressed and rolled to fit in that box?) but that didn't happen. So here is what I did:
I) Cut slats - reused 1x6s cut to fit bed width and then cut in half (long ways) to fit into grooves of the side rails (which doubled how many slats I had).
II) Cut 3/4" plywood to lay on top of the slats, also within the side rails, for added support (it's an old bed, some of the grooves had broken off, did not want to chance the memory foam pushing through in between the slats, my kid is wild).
III) Cut +/- 4 inches off of the memory foam mattress width so it would sit within the side rails. I was a bit worried about this, like what in the world was the mattress going to look like after I cut it?! But after it arrived, I unboxed it, and let it fill out, I noticed that the cover actually had a zipper on the bottom! Before I started cutting it, I unzipped and pulled the cover back - cut - then pulled the cover back over and zipped it up.
And that's all folks. Like, why the heck did it take me this long to fix this?! Because I had no clue to use a memory foam mattress until you awesome followers chimed in and helped! Thank you! Aside from some extra support and the invention of memory foam, this bed is back to how it once was. I am so happy that the mattress fits down in the side rails now so the beautiful head and footboards can really be seen as intended when it was made way back when. Original = happy Kristian.
Don't forget...
Last week I mentioned a little diy that I might share with you, if all went well...and so far it is, but it isn't completely finished! I will leave that for next week. Until then I will be posting hints in the Intsa ORC Highlights (there is one there already, and another in an earlier ORC post), so keep watch, and see if you can guess it!
Gotta go nurse a chicken,