Comment by colanderman | Hacker News Reader

Comment by colanderman | Hacker News Reader

When you’re moving from one location to another, your mattress is generally either the largest thing you’re taking with you, or the second-largest thing.

Um, what? Not the couch, or the bureau, or the dining room table? Maybe this is true of furnished apartments, but for me, even the boxspring beats the mattress in terms of "this is so large how the heck am I going to get it from point A to point B". Mattress is pretty far down that list.

Not that this matters much for foam mattresses, since, once unrolled, a foam mattress is nearly impossible to roll back up and is just as difficult to move.

That said, the author's point about the initial ship of foam mattresses is a good one. Going with a foam mattress was the only reason I was able to drive it home in the back of my 2-seater to a very dense part of Boston and fit it into the lofted bed of a tiny studio apartment.

But when it came time to move? I sold it to the next tenant. No way that was making the journey out as easily.

I would say, though, that the mattress is by far the most annoying. It's a floppy object with handles - if it even has handles - that are placed in arguably the word possible location:

      _____
     |     |
    [|     |]
     |     |
    [|     |]
     |_____|

This is fine if you're carrying your mattress pallbearer style down a wide open hallway, with it orientated the same way as it would be laying on your bed. But in reality, most people move to places with hallways, or stairwells, where it would make the most sense to rotate it 90 degrees about the longest axis - and the best way to carry it then would be with handles here:

        _
      _|_|_
     |     |
     |     |
     |     |
     |     |
     |_____|
       |_|

Agreed, but you can often move a mattress in such situations by simply pushing it along the floor, even down stairs. Not true of most other furniture.

I don't disagree with you that handles would be useful on the ends, but I think that the ones on the sides are for when you are flipping it.

Hm, my mattress has a very definitive built-in padded top, so flipping it isn't really an option - but still has the shitty, useless side handles.

The handles are for flipping the mattress every few months, not carrying it :-)

I was able to take a queen sized mattress down to my car by myself thanks to those side handles. I didn't have to drag it on the floor. Also, when I tied the mattress to the roof of my car, I looped the twine through and around the handles. The whole process was not easy, but it would have been a lot harder given the configuration you are describing.

If you buy quality goods, then the you will find that the designers have often paid attention to details like this. Certainly I have moved mattresses which had handles on the ends.

btw I'm not saying that higher priced goods always have better designers.. sometimes its all just markup.

A mattress generally does not have enough rigidity to allow it to be carried by the far ends like that. If you put handles at the head and foot and carried it that way, it would likely sag so badly that you'd be dragging it the whole way.

Edit: Nevermind. It works fine so long as you turn the mattress on its side like everyone does when they actually move a mattress. The diagram made me think of carrying it flat, which really only happens when assembling the bed.

Every time I've transported mine, I've ended up carrying it exactly like that, having to grip the ends with my hands, and it's never sagged in that way.

I don't think I've ever owned a mattress that wouldn't have sagged too much if carried like that, unless maybe I was going to carry out overhead to keep it off the ground. You must be buying much stiffer mattresses than me.

In fairness, I've not moved my current mattress (a memory foam mattress), so maybe that one would work? It's a bit more rigid. But of course no handles at all.

Edit: Nevermind. You're going to turn the mattress on it's side when you actually carry it, and then it will be rigid enough. Handles on the ends work fine for this case, just not the nonexistent case where someone inexplicably tries to carry the mattress flat for more than a few feet.

What? It would sag when you have it turned on it's side vertically? That's like, bean-bag level sag.

No. I added an edit that addressed that.

Ah, I see now. Looking back, it wasn't terribly clear what the parent meant by changing the orientation to carry it by, I just made the connection automatically and assumed it was there.

Another idea: Loops so that you can "hang" a floppy mattress from a long rigid pole carried by two people.

>...for me, even the boxspring beats the mattress in terms of "this is so large how the heck am I going to get it from point A to point B".

Eight years ago, I moved into an apartment with a very narrow staircase with a 90 degree bend in it. I purchased a new mattress, and couldn't fit the boxspring in it. The delivery guys took the boxspring back, and got me a boxspring that comes in two pieces, called a "split boxspring". It's basically two twin boxsprings that you put side by side. You can see one here: http://www.raymourflanigan.com/beautyrest-recharge-high-prof...

You don't notice anything different when you're on the bed. I've kept the boxspring through various moves, and I'll never buy a non-split one again. Moving the two pieces is so much easier; they're not unwieldy or heavy at all.

King size beds always have split boxspring.

My dining room table disassembles. My couch is smaller than my mattress. My bureau is smaller is than my mattress.

If you have a pillow top queen mattress or, especially, a king sized pillow top, it is huge.

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