Sunday, March 11, 2012

The "Build or Buy" Decision

White Oak Bed Frame & Slats
***Updated 2/11/17*** This is the first in a series of 6 articles that chronicle the planning and building of our polyurethane and latex foam bed. See the links to the right to review all of the steps we used to build the perfect foam bed.

We are not bedding designers or bedding experts. I am a retired university professor and my wife retired from our state's Department of Agriculture. In the beginning building a bed from scratch was not our intention but the more we learned, and we can be a bit obsessive when researching a topic, the more it made sense to simply build our own bed rather than accept the run-of-the-mill mattress store offerings.

Just to complete the picture - my wife is average size, I am somewhat heavier than average but about average height, and we both prefer a fairly firm mattress.

In The Beginning ...
Initially we just wanted a new mattress. After sleeping on a so-so innerspring mattress and box-spring for the last 20 years we decided it was long-past time to get something new. Nothing special or expensive, just an upgrade and improvement over our current bed. Our bed frame is beautiful furniture-grade white oak so all we needed was a new mattress set. Our budget was around $1000.

We began our search as most people do in a mattress store looking at pillow-top innerspring mattresses and the current "in-thing" of the mattress industry the so-called memory foam beds (for example Tempur-Pedic (tm)). Queen-size innerspring mattress sets (mattress + boxspring) from name-brand manufacturers like Sealy and Serta begin at about $800 and can cost as much as $2000 depending on which "bells and whistles" you add. Memory foam beds cost considerably more, in the range of $1500 - $4000, depending mainly on the thickness of the memory foam layer. We did not consider an air bed because of the high cost of these beds.

Near the end of our first day of shopping for a mattress the salesperson suggested we try a latex foam bed. "What's the difference?" we asked. The salesperson tolds us that "latex foam is springy and pushes back while memory foam just absorbs the weight. Memory foam can "sleep hot" for some people but with newer and more expensive memory foams this is less of a problem."

Our own in-store experience was that memory foam was much too soft and tended to trap us in the depression of the foam making turning and getting out of bed more difficult, latex foam was less "enveloping" and more supportive, at least to us. We definitely liked the feel of latex foam over memory foam but both were better than even expensive innerspring mattresses. We decided at that point that we'd buy a latex foam mattress if we could find one in our price range of around $1000.

Mattress-Store Latex Foam


The basic latex mattresses that you find in stores or online have a 2"-3" layer of latex on top of 1" - 5" of polyurethane foam, and were in our price range. The thicker the top latex layer the more expensive and "cushier" the mattress.

Why we decided to DIY ...
However, we discovered that buying a mattress through a retail store or online is a bit like hiring a professional painter to paint one small room in your home, and then insisting that the painter use cheap paint in order to save a few dollars. Not only are you paying way too much to get this one small room painted but in the end the result will be inferior because the quality workmanship won't make up for the cheap materials used.

If instead of calling in the "pros" what if you bought some high quality paint and rollers and spent a few hours painting the walls yourself. Since painting a small room is not technically difficult you'd probably end up with a better paint job at much less cost because you saved on labor by doing it yourself.

This is exactly the logic we used when we decided to build our new mattress instead of buying one. Beds are very simple things. There are only three pieces - a frame, a foundation and a mattress. The mattress is made of the support layer and a comfort layer - not complicated, no moving parts. Plus, there's a lot of profit margin built into the cost of a mattress. The proof of this is the number of mattress store ads we all see on television. If there wasn't a lot of margin they could not discount the mattresses as they do.

Our Decision Made

So, naturally, as soon as we got home we jumped on the Internet and began googling "latex mattress" and "latex foam". We quickly learned that you can buy complete latex foam mattresses consisting of the foam plus cover or uncovered latex foam slabs. Given the significant price differential we decided to take a stab at building our own bed from individual components. So, we set out to assemble the parts we'd need to build the Perfect Foam Bed.

If you have questions or comments please contact us through our other website LivingWithBugs