I feel like a home manager sometimes. At work I’m a writer, editor, assistant, coordinator; but at home, I handle inventory, accounting, scheduling, purchasing – so I get to handle a lot of the decision making when it comes to what we buy.
A couple years ago, we found ourselves in need of a mattress. In our fully furnished house, the California king sized mattress the landlady had in the master bedroom was bordering on the ancient, and proving to be back breaking. With a baby on the way, it was time to find an alternative.
Why I Hate Mattress Shopping
There’s a little method I use to make sure we’re always getting the best possible products and necessities for our home. Since it’s not financially realistic to just go out and buy healthy alternatives to the junk we’ve acquired over our lives, every time something needs replacing or updating, I just troubleshoot it like crazy until I find a solution that makes sense.
That’s how it was with replacing our mattress. I did a lot of research on the topic, and what I surmised from my reading was that typical mattresses were not only expensive, but made of some really nasty stuff. Petroleum based textiles, flame retardant chemicals, materials that were hard to clean, had to off-gas for days before they were usable — it was really unappealing.
After a few days of reading, I still wasn’t sure what the solution was, but I knew it wasn’t something from Serta. That’s when the real research began, and I became really familiar with the alternatives to these types of mattresses that exist on the market today.