Who's on first?

One of the projects we worked on this past weekend was making all of the bedrooms upstairs more comfy for sleeping. Sounds simple, but the execution was insanely confusing.

As we cleaned up the house, we unearthed an unbelievable amount of sheets and comforter covers. Seriously mind-boggling. Conservatively, I’d estimate that we found maybe fifty sheets, and twenty comforter covers. None of these were useable for more than a few days, though, because:

a) Nothing matched

b) Nothing seemed to fit the beds properly

c) We found tons of comforter covers, but not enough actual comforters to cover the beds

d) Everything was old, musty, and frankly… I really can’t stand the idea of sleeping on someone else’s sheets.

In order to get the bedding problem sorted, we first had to figure out the bed situation.

There are four bedrooms upstairs. Two are very small, and two are very big. On the first night, Frankie chose one of the big bedrooms for herself (the room actually has two beds in it, a big one and a small one), and Matt and I took the other bedroom.

We only need three bedrooms, though: One for Frankie, one for me and Matt, and one for guests. This meant that we needed to get rid of a bed from one of the small bedrooms in one in order to turn it into a playroom. Frankie’s room (bedroom 1) had two beds in it: a kids bed and a large bed. The Master bedroom (bedroom 2) had a large bed. The guest room (bedroom 3) had a medium-sized bed. The extra room (bedroom 4) also had a medium-sized bed. Bedroom 4 was far and away the most unpleasant and cluttered of the bedrooms. Since it was to awful to ever function as a comfortable guest room, it became the only logical choice for the playroom.

So, the solution seems simple, right? Just take the bed out of bedroom 4 and move it to the basement, leaving everything else as is. But, there was a problem. Even though the bed in the master bedroom was big, it was totally unusable. Why? The bed frame was astonishingly, ridiculously squeaky. And I’m not just being a overly-sensitive princess here. Even Matt said it was too squeaky to sleep on. I believe his exact words were, “An engineering class should come over here and study this bed frame as an example of how to build something that squeaks as loudly as possible.” Round here, we started to refer to the bed as “Ol’ Squeaky.” As in, “Which one of us is going to have to sleep on Ol’ Squeaky tonight? Not me!”

So, the frame in the master bedroom had to go. We needed to replace it with the biggest possible bed, because Matt and I are not the kind of married folks that like to sleep spooned together. We like our own space. Bigger is better. We’d push together two California King beds and sleep on those if it was socially acceptable. (Or, if we thought we could find sheets that would fit.)

Other than the master bedroom, the only other room that had a big bed in it was Frankie’s room. There was no way that Frankie was going to switch rooms with us. So, we needed to move Frankie’s big bed into our master bedroom. To accomplish this and to get the other bedrooms to a functioning state, we had to do the following:

1) Take out the master bed and move it two floors down into the basement.

2) Move the big bed from Frankie’s room into the master bedroom.

3) Move the double bed from bedroom 4 (which, remember, was going to become a playroom?) into Frankie’s room.

The only room that got to keep its original bed was the guest room (bedroom 3). That one, we didn’t touch.

Confused yet? It gets worse.

Keep in mind that we did the IKEA shopping trip on Saturday, before we had executed all of this bed shuffling. Sure, we had already decided what we were going to do, but it was all hypothetical at that point. When we went to IKEA, then, we had to decide what size linens and comforter covers we needed for the house.

It was way more complicated than you might imagine. It was like a headache-inducing story problem from a high school math textbook.

To recap:

There were five beds upstairs: One kids bed, two medium-sized beds, two large beds. One of the large beds had to be taken away, leaving behind one large bed, two medium beds, and one kids bed. We already had a plain white down comforter for the large bed, but no sheets or comforter cover. We had nothing for either of the medium-sized beds. For the kids bed, we already had a plain down comforter, but no sheets or comforter cover.

So, what did we need to buy?

Seems like we could probably wrap our heads around that problem. BUT, now you have to factor in the following complication: UK bed sizing.

In the UK, all of the beds are sized differently than in the US. So much so that we had to consult a conversion chart online before heading to IKEA. In the US, the biggest bed size is a king. In the UK, they also call the biggest bed size available a “king,” but it’s actually not the same size as a US king. A UK king is the same as a US queen.

Furthermore…

There’s no such thing as a “queen size” bed in Europe. After a UK king, the next largest bed size in the UK is a “double.” (It’s somewhat similar to what we call a “full-size” bed in the US.) A kids bed, which we call a “twin” in the US is called a “single” over here.

So, as Matt and I were talking through what we needed in the bedrooms, we kept slipping back and forth between the names for US and UK sizes, and kept getting all discombobulated.

Now, the next complication:

IKEA is a Swedish company, so they don’t label with US or UK sized on the bedding packages. They just put measurements on the package, in inches and centimeters. So, we had to check out all of the packages by size, compare them with UK bed measurements, remember not to confuse ourselves with the difference between US and UK sizes, and work around the bedding that we already had.

Lastly, factor in the fact that IKEA was insanely busy, and the linen section was the very last stop of our shopping trip. We were exhausted, surrounded by people, and totally confused as to what we needed.

It took forever and all of our brain power, but somehow we did it. Which is a god thing, because IKEA was two hours away, and it wouldn’t exactly be convenient to run back to the store and make changes to what we ended up buying.

It cracks me up now, thinking of Matt and I sitting on the floor of IKEA, bleary-eyed, trying to piece together the bedding puzzle. At the time, though, it was totally stressful.