Bedtime story

It all started two weeks ago when I was making the bed and found water on the floor. My first thought was which animal peed on the floor? Upon further inspection I realized that no one peed on the floor it was our water bed leaking. The water bed was a soft sided Somma with tubes to hold the water, each side had three tubes so Tom and I could adjust the amount of water for our personal preferences. We realized later that the tubes weren't leaking enough to cause the amount of water that was dripping on the floor, rather due to the hot, humid weather we have been experiencing it was actually condensation from the outside of the tubes. We know the bed leaked periodically over the years and when we had the pieces apart we found mold/mildew in seams of the top mattress cover of the bed, the foam piece that covered the water filled tubes. It was time to replace the old water bed with a new regular mattress, we decided to get a full size vs the queen because the head board and foot board are actually a full size and with the water bed Tom had installed steel plates on the outside of the legs to hold the water bed and of course I would always bump into them and leave bruises on my legs.

This should have been a simple process, go to the furniture store, pick out what we wanted, bring it home, set it into the current bed rails, make the bed and be done with it. Well, it wasn't. We found the rails that held the water bed were thicker than standard bed rails and we needed about 1/2" of space in order for the full size foundation to fit into the space. This meant after almost two weeks we had a bed but still couldn't set it up. We called the furniture store and bed rails were $70.00, we thought a ridiculous price to pay for two pieces of metal to go down the side of the bed so we called another store and were told they were special order and would be $90.00. That didn't set right with us either so we decided to wait until Sunday and go to the salvage store to see if they had any rails which they did and they were only $15.00.

We got the new rails home, installed them on the bed and still could not fit the foundation on because of the way the rails were made. I couldn't imagine why it wouldn't fit as this bed was the one I purchased at a yard sale 25 years ago when we graduated Angela from a youth bed to a regular bed and at one time we had full size bed rails for it -goodness only knows where those rails went once we converted it to hold the water bed.

Tom, being the type of person to figure out how to fix a challenge, began looking over the situation. He told me he could cut new slots for the rails further out on the legs but with careful measurements he still could not get enough space for the foundation to fit on the rails. The solution was on one side of the bed he cut out new slots for the rail and on the other side of the bed he screwed the rail directly to the outside of the legs of the head board and foot board, the foundation fit perfect. With the quilt on the bed no one can see how he fixed our problem and now we can still use our antique bed which matches some of the dressers that once belonged to Tom's grandmother.

Lastnight was the best night's sleep I've had in ages. Tom is a good man!