The Not-so-Free-Bed

It's 7:30pm. Sam from Craigslist is outside my house with his 18 year old son and my husband, trying to fit our dismantled queen size bed into his tiny hatchback. There's a lot of trial and error. Sam doesn't seem to have much experience because he's brought various belts and scarves to tie up the headboard to the roof of his rack-less car. While my husband, the engineer, and master-car-stuffer-arranger is politely trying to convince Sam to do it his way, Sam's son is standing on the sidewalk doing his best teenage, embarassed-by-my-dad stance and not lifting a finger. An hour later, Sam and his son finally return home with all the bed pieces stuffed in their car. This is the story of our bed.

Ten years ago, my husband arrived in Vancouver from his studies in England and bought a bed at Ikea; nothing fancy. I don't remember when I started to feel the individual springs poking through, but it's been at least a year that I've noticed my knee caps fit perfectly in them. Aside from the lumpy mattress, the frame itself has been squeaking every time we turn over which is amplified through the mattress. So after months of saying to each other that we should buy a new bed, we finally blocked off a Saturday morning to go check some out.

We zeroed in on one store that carried what we wanted, the kid jumped on all of them and after sleeping on it, (pun intended) we finally settled on a something we could both agree on. The retailer informed us that we would have to pay $50 for the delivery guys to take away our old bed and another $50 for the mattress. Ah! The hidden cost of things! Imagine what it would look like if we went to a store and the cost of removal/recycling was itemized along with the purchase cost? Would we think more about what why buy if we could see what it costs to have it hauled away to the dump or processed in a recycling plant?

So I posted my bed on Craigslist for free and thought I'd save myself $50.  In one day, I had almost 100 interested people. Sam was third on the list. The first lady had a purse stolen on the way to pick up my bed, the second lady never returned my calls and Sam, happy to get this bed for his son, showed up on the first night with his tiny car and no rope.

Our lumpy mattress is now on the floor and we're having a blast. The kid is jumping like crazy, rolling and doing somersaults. We're been running up to the mattress in the middle of the day to read stories and fool around with the blankets. The kid is the Olympic Mattress Jumping Gold Medalist and I'm the commenter. I'll be happy to get rid of this scrap metal lump loosely draped with a cheap mystery fabric when the new mattress and bed frame arrives and I'll pay the $50 to have it hauled away, but I'll miss the fun we've been having with it.