Living Like a Hobo in My Own Home

I moved back to D.C. with a twin bed of questionable (read: free & communal) origins. It had been the guest bed in our Jersey apartment, which meant no one ever really slept in it. Prior to moving, the most I'd ever done with/for/on it was check to be sure it didn't have bedbugs, spray it with copious amounts of Febreze, & take a singular midday nap on it. Suddenly, though, it became my every-night bed.

I seriously considered trying to accept life as an almost-30-year-old woman who sleeps in a secondhand twin bed every night, but downgrading from my two-bedroom, two-bathroom adult apartment to a tiny studio was difficult enough - plus, the twin squeaked any time I moved, waking me up every time I rolled over in the middle of the night.

Let's face it: A twin bed is no place for an adult.

And so, after a very serious, enlightening, drunken conversation with my friend Allison's boyfriend in which he touted the merits (price, reliability, comfort!) of beds from Overstock.com, I went ahead & ordered a queen-sized bed. Off the Internet.

The mattress arrived first, & I started sleeping on it immediately, even without a bed frame to put it on. So comfy! So spacious! So unsqueaky! In fact, I was so comfortable on my floor-bed that when the frame arrived a week later, I felt no hurry to assemble it or even to open the unwieldy, 60-lb. box it arrived in.

This was in part because I don't have any tools. I checked with some friends, none of whom seem to own a full toolbox (apparently not a requirement of adulthood, like full-sized beds are), so I just... sort of gave up for a bit. I slept on my floor-bed, & I enjoyed it. I couldn't take the twin bed to the dumpster on my own, though, so for about a month, my tiny apartment was home to two beds & a giant bed box.

(Did I mention that I also didn't own queen-sized sheets? It took me a week & a half, but I finally bought some. I'm kind of gross, I know.)
 
Finally, after a month of sleeping on my floor-bed, Nathan was coming for a visit & said he'd help me put the bed frame together. "You have to open the box, though," he told me, "so that I know what tools to bring." Grumbling all the while, I wrestled with the giant box &, after a brief struggle, got it open, fully expecting to face a jumble of unidentifiable, disconnected metal bed pieces accompanied by some vague DIY instructions.

Here's what I found instead:

Yeah, that's a fully-assembled bed frame. All I had to do with lug it out of the box, unfold it, latch the two folding parts together, & plop the mattress on top. I let this already-made bed frame sit in a sealed box next to my mattress for a full month before bothering to open it & realize that it was, in fact, already made.

Upon hearing this ridiculous tale, a friend summed up the moral of the story this way: The lesson is that you never have to wait for a man's tools to open your own box.

Ain't that the truth. Sleep tight, friends.