I’ve been a busy bee today so I haven’t had time to peruse the loch out the back. By that I do, of course, mean the garden, but you’d be forgiven for thinking it was one big water feature following Storm Ciara and Storm Dennis. Storm Ellen’s the next one so let’s hope she cries her tears elsewhere when she blows over our little island. My busy day has followed a busy week so I don’t have any garden pics which means I’m taking a leave of absence from Six on Saturday today, instead I’m going to talk beds!

On our cruise, we had a ginormous bed. When you think of ships’ cabins, you think bunk beds Royal Navy style, but today’s modern cruise liners have every luxury imaginable.

This was our bed. It’s hard to appreciate how big it was from this photo, but it was almost as wide as it was long and I slept so well in it. Of course, there will have been other factors helping me catch the zeds such as that holiday relaxation feeling, the odd glass of vino and the roll of the ship which makes you feel you’re being gently rocked to sleep, but I’m sure the extra space contributed too.

As an aside, this was my view in bed this morning.

I have straightened the pictures since I took the photo, but as you can see, I was somewhat stuck! I was lounging in bed researching how to earn more Tesco Clubcard points because Royal Caribbean are a reward partner and give you three times the value which you can redeem against a cruise. In case anyone’s interested, my findings were that I should use my Tesco credit card more for every day purchases (and pay it off straight away so as not to get into debt), to use the app rather than the plastic card for double points until the end of February, to give hubby my plastic card now I have the app so he can collect points too, to try to always use Tesco petrol stations and to switch to Tesco mobile once my phone contract’s up. Hopefully we’ll be back on that ship in no time! Anyway …..

Two weeks ago we decided to take the plunge and upgrade our double bed to a king size. Frivolous maybe, given that there’s no guarantee of us sleeping like a pair of infants, but we have both been getting backache recently so maybe a new mattress was in order anyway.

We checked out a couple of bed shops and we actually ended up choosing one from a carpet shop! It felt like it was meant to be because years ago, when my parents and I were moving house in my mid teens, my Grandparents offered to buy me a new bed for the new house and it came from Allied Carpets which was on the very same retail park. We had a new doorbell in the car when we drove in to the car park and as we went over every speed bump it jingled. To this day when I drive in there I think ‘ting’ to myself as I go over those speed bumps.

We chose a very similar bed to our existing double one, just in king size. We have to have a bed frame style rather than a divan (although I was very tempted by the ones which have a television in the footboard) because our fur babies sleep underneath and rush off there whenever anything scary and potentially life threatening happens such as the bin men rattling the wheelie bins or someone daring to knock the front door! It wasn’t loads of money at all, and we got an excellent deal on our mattress.

It’s this one. It should’ve been £1699 (which I would never entertain spending on a mattress – that’s a holiday!) but because it has a small water stain at the top from, we were reliably informed, a leak in the shop (believable given the recent monsoons) it was marked down to £399. Sold!

I need to find out now if there’s a chance that the springs are made using ArcelorMittal steel. The hull and decks of the ship we sailed on, Harmony of the Seas, were built using ArcelorMittal heavy plates which was my former baby. My new role in the company (which I’m really enjoying three weeks in – I’ll likely write something about that somewhen) is bars and rods and one of the end applications is bed springs so it would seem apt if I’m now to be eating, breathing and (literally) sleeping ArcelorMittal bars and rods!

On Thursday the bed and mattress were delivered and today was the first available opportunity to assemble it. Unfortunately hubby was working and I’m impatient, so I did it on my own. No mean feat! We’d decided to put our old bed in the spare room where we previously had a sofa bed, which has been cluttering the pavement outside since Tuesday evening as the highly competent council didn’t pick it up on Wednesday despite already taking the £33 payment (although the scrap man has taken the mechanism!) so I had to (on my own, remember!) take the mattress from the old bed down the hall to the bathroom, take the headboard and footboard off the old bed and man handle all the bits into the spare room, then take all the bits of the new bed (king size, so even bigger) from the spare room to our bedroom and assemble them whilst precariously holding them together risking my bare toes, then heave the king size mattress from the spare room to our bedroom to put it on the new bed. The mattress did not make this easy, but I am far more stubborn than a mattress is unwieldy and I will not be beaten by a rectangle of wool, cashmere and silk! Here it is.

I then had to reassemble the old bed in the spare room and pull the mattress in from the bathroom.

Then I made both beds (it seems we can only have single people to stay currently as we only have one pillow for the spare bed!) and cleared the copious amounts of packaging away.

All this manoeuvring involved pushing/pulling big heavy things halfway down the stairs and then hauling them back up and in the adjacent door to the one from which they exited. There may be slightly less paint on the banisters now than when I started, but hey, the banisters could do with sanding down anyway and I’m not letting minor detail detract from my triumph.

We were slightly concerned that the new bed would take up too much room. Hubby was concerned that Aston would no longer fit in his space …

… but he does.

It actually doesn’t look that much bigger. It’s only six inches wider but I’m sure it will make all the difference (cue all you guys breathing a sigh of relief 😂), and it’s this much longer.

Phew – after all that heaving and hauling I’m ready to go and test how zed inducing the bargain mattress is!

Night night, sleep tight, hope the bed bugs don’t bite.