Once Upon a Mattress

The Frugal Maven loves her bed. I could go home every night, get out of the foundation garments, pour a glass of tea and curl up until the alarm goes off the next morning, especially in the winter. When friends call to invite us over or out on the spur of the moment the first question asked is if I still have my bra on. If the answer is no, they don't even ask twice. They know we're in for the evening.

Several years ago when we needed a new mattress for our rental house in Florida I went to the Mattress-N-More or the Mattress Warehouse or some other cliched name with bad lighting and ran screaming from the store after about two minutes of desperate sales pitches. Now as you know, I am in the car business so I try to be fair to any person striving to make an honest living in sales. Even so, these guys just made me want to hide. I took myself straight to the Sam's Club where they offer firm or extra-firm in the usual sizes and that's that. $65o lighter and much less stressed, my friend Nola and I strapped it in the back of the pickup truck, got on the road and promptly watched it blow out of the truck bed into oncoming traffic. With the help of some good Samaritans we loaded it back up again and went on our way. Now lovely snow birds are sleeping on it and looking out over the pool from the bedroom while we are in Kentucky waiting for the next ice storm/hurricane/tornado.

But I digress. The point of this meandering tale is that my friend Kim over at Finding Deals in the Ville has a coupon on her blog today for 20% off on Sunday at Big Lots. These coupons come periodically by email if you're on the list. Our last mattress, which I so look forward to reclining on very shortly, came from the Big Lots. They sell Serta mattresses that are the same (as far as I can tell) as you would get in a mattress store or a department store. And they are cheap. The sell eurotops, value, plush and perfect sleepers. Our queen pillowtop mattress only was about $420 with the 20% off. A deal by any measure and it has stood up very well. Of course, when we win the lottery we'll be buying this lovely Hastens (seen above) which is handmade in Sweden of horsehair, etc., etc. and starts at $5,000 and tops out at $50,000. Or not.